Following the recent statement by WordPress’s co-founder Matt Mullenweg and the Creative Commons CEO, Catherine Stihler’s post, I’m happy to formally announce that CC Search (with the new name Openverse) is now part of the WordPress open source project. Both Matt and I are long-time supporters of Creative Commons. I hope that this will provide a long-term, sustainable challenger to closed source photo libraries and further enhance the WordPress ecosystem.

How Does This Affect Current Users?

Current CC Search users will continue searching and using openly licensed images from around the internet. WordPress plans to continue the great work started by the Creative Commons project and expand search capabilities and features.

What’s Next?

We look forward to indexing and searching additional media, such as audio and video. As we expand our capabilities and grow the project, we look forward to integrating directly into WordPress and the media library. We hope to not only allow search and embeds of openly licensed media but pay it forward by additionally licensing and sharing your media back.

How Can You Contribute? 

Stop by the Slack channel, #openverse, and take a look at the code repositories moved under the WordPress organization here on GitHub. You can also follow along with the project on its own make page at: https://make.wordpress.org/openverse. We are working on setting up the new team, process, and procedures.

Join us in welcoming the team and community. As a treat, check out the most recent WP Briefing episode, The Commons of Images, in which Matt and I discuss CC Search and our hopes for it as part of the WordPress community.