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Hypotheses integrates PublishPress Authors and OpenEdition License plugins

As part of an initiative to introduce new Terms and Conditions of Use (TCU) and roll out a licensing policy across all OpenEdition platforms, the Hypotheses platform now includes two new plugins: PublishPress Authors and OpenEdition License. The plugins let you attribute an article to a guest author who doesn’t have an account on the platform, credit several authors for the same article and apply a Creative Commons license to every blog post.

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Nathalie Casanova (N.C.), Hypotheses’ Community Manager, and Émilie Cornillaux (E.C.), Information Systems Administrator, spoke to us about these new features.

  • The Hypotheses platform has recently introduced the PublishPress Authors plugin. Why has this new plugin been added?

E.C. On the Hypotheses platform, which hosts 8,470 blogs sharing the words and ideas of tens of thousands of contributors, two needs have regularly cropped up over the years: the option to credit several authors for the same post and the possibility of attributing posts to authors who do not have a WordPress account. Although platform users came up with their own solutions during that time (group accounts or concatenated names), none of them were ideal.

That’s why we focused on how to dissociate the notion of author from that of user account, and how to make sure that metadata would accurately reflect who had made which contributions. Our goal was to guarantee that each blog post could display the name(s) of its author(s), and that the author information would be integrated into the data flows that give the posts visibility (OAI-PMH, DOI Datacite).

N.C. The new features offered by the plugin make it easier to manage posts, thereby meeting the needs evoked by numerous bloggers over the years.

For some publishing projects, producing material for a research blog hosted by the Hypotheses platform can involve a considerable amount of teamwork. Yet, not everyone working on a research project will be involved in blogging to the same extent. Some choose not use the features available at all, because they don’t know how or aren’t interested in WordPress, the CMS on which the platform is based. This can also be true for Hypotheses’ non-academic contributors.

The plugin allows one or more people to credit individual posts. It also ensures that people can only access and use the administrative interface if they have a user account, and not just as a blog post author. The person adding a guest author can also add information about the author. It helps improve indexing for the author and the blog as a whole.

  • Why did you choose the PublishPress Authors plugin?

E.C. We tested several solutions and PublishPress Authors proved to be the most appropriate. Developed specifically for WordPress, the plugin lets you attribute a post to a guest author who does not have a WordPress account, as well as manage several co-authors for the same post. The benefits are: 

– Profiles are all managed in one place: guest authors are saved in a registry and can then be added to posts as and when.
– Metadata are displayed: names of authors appear directly on the site, including in previous posts, and can be retrieved from OpenEdition’s information system.
– Access to comprehensive user documentation and a responsive support service, guaranteeing long-term viability.

Although the plugin is robust, we still needed to make a few adjustments before rolling it out across our network of multiple sites comprising 8,470 blogs. We simplified permissions management so that only administrators could access the plugin features, to avoid any complications. Another snag was compatibility with the Polylang plugin required for all the languages we manage. In the end, the solution came from WordPress itself, which now plans to natively integrate multilingual options in future versions of its plugin.

  • Can you tell us a bit about the OpenEdition License plugin?

E.C. The decision to roll out the OpenEdition License plugin emerged from discussions on how to make it more obvious that a license has been applied to a post. Bloggers can now choose between a Creative Commons license (CC0), or no license (a temporary option pending the release of Hypotheses’ new Terms and Conditions of Use). In time, applying a Creative Commons license will become compulsory to ensure content is published in a transparent and fair way.

This forward step is part of the I-FAIR IR project, which gave us the means to draw up a licensing policy common to all four OpenEdition platforms. Every post now displays the license applied to it, and users know exactly under which conditions they can reuse content.

N.C. The License plugin paves the way for bloggers to clearly signpost the conditions for reusing each post. It is OpenEdition’s way of encouraging users to shift to a Creative Commons reuse mindset when it comes to publishing content on any of its four platforms.

  • What were the key stages of the plugin project?

N.C. The OpenEdition team worked long and hard to be able to offer these new plugin features. 

For features relating to article authorship, the first thing we did was to find available plugins that were compatible with an environment made up of several platforms. Hypotheses is a platform that hosts numerous sites and manages over 30,000 users across almost 8,500 blogs. It operates very differently from a single WordPress site. When you install plugins, there’s always a risk of bugs occurring, which means you need to be able to backtrack to check which changes generated the bugs. On a multi-site platform, it’s much harder to backtrack as so many blogs are involved. The risk of impacting all content is therefore much higher.

Following on from this crucial preliminary research work, OpenEdition’s Data Services and Research Blogging departments carried out tests to find out if any existing features were incompatible with the new features. For example, the Cite and WP About Author plugins were removed because they were not compatible with PublishPress Authors, and an automatic citation system was set up before installing PublishPress Authors.

As for the OpenEdition License plugin, it was developed in-house to meet the specific requirements of Hypotheses. The two services mentioned above worked together to build the plugin. It then underwent the same kind of tests as those carried out before adding other existing plugins.

The License plugin was then ready to be rolled out by OpenEdition’s System Administration Department.

As you can see, most of the work centred around checking whether the plugins met user requirements and whether they clashed with existing features.

  • How do the new plugins improve platform users’ overall experience?

E.C. Hypotheses has reached an important milestone with these plugins: blog post metadata are reliable and usable at last. This progress paves the way for adding further features, such as integrating IdRef or ORCID identifiers for authors, which is something we will be working on as part of the FNSO-funded QUAMEO project.

N.C. Beyond data reliability and improved indexing, the new features also make it easier to use the platform, especially for people in charge of publishing posts for colleagues. Creating a guest author makes it easier to attribute an article to the right person, without that person having to sign in or do anything on the platform.

Furthermore, adding an explicit license makes it easier to indicate which content can be reused, and enables data to be disseminated more widely.

For users, it’s an ideal opportunity for a spring-clean – group accounts or concatenated names can be replaced with accurate metadata, thereby improving the visibility and traceability of works. For OpenEdition, these plugins guarantee data that are richer and more interconnected, which is essential for a platform dedicated to research.

  • Where can bloggers access documentation on using these parameters?

N.C. Four posts have been published on the French version of our documentary resources blog La Maison des Carnets to guide users: 

 collaborer avec un compte sur Hypothèses (Working with a Hypotheses account as a team).

– écrire en tant qu’invité, écrire à plusieurs ou publier pour quelqu’un d’autre (Writing as a guest, a group or for someone else).

– afficher la signature publique d’une personne avec un compte et celle d’invités sans compte (Displaying the public signature of account holders and guest writers with no account).

– afficher des licences Creative Commons sur Hypothèses (Displaying Creative Commons licenses on Hypotheses).

And if Hypotheses users have further questions, they can post them on Hypotheses’ support forum.


The text only may be used under licence Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Nathalie Casanova, Émilie Cornillaux, Camille Mattei (April 1, 2026). Hypotheses integrates PublishPress Authors and OpenEdition License plugins. Open Electronic Publishing. Retrieved April 13, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15zhj


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