Planet Venus
Creative Commmons uses feed aggregation software to collect in one place CC blogs, jurisdictions blogs, and also blogs of people and organizations that are closely associated with or actively involved in the CC community.
The software we are using to do this is called Planet Venus, which is a major rewrite of Planet done by San Ruby. For more information and documentation on Planet Venus, please see the project's page.
CC has slightly extended Planet Venus via a few plugins. First of all, as licensing information is eminently important to CC, we have created a plugin that will pull license information from the feeds and make it available to the HTML templates. For an example of the output, take a look at the CC Planet. The plugin name is get_license_name.plugin and can be viewed/downloaded at the cctools subversion repository at sourceforge.net.
NOTE: the plugin only works for HTMLTMPL templates. XSLT and Genshi templates have full access to every feed element and therefore can extract licensing data directly.
