Open‑Source Plugins for Metadata Management of the Verfassungsblog

In this project, several WordPress plugins were developed as Open‑Source software and published on GitHub.

Project Context

The Verfassungsblog publishes academic articles about German legal policy both online and in periodic journals. To support the discussion of current topics, it is important to provide quotable metadata about each article as soon as possible, e.g., by automatically registering a DOI.

A lot of required metadata can already be managed by WordPress or existing plugins. In this project, the following additional functions were implemented:

• Export of metadata in bibliographic standard formats, e.g., Marc21 XML, MODS 3.7 XML, Dublin Core XML
• Export of metadata via an XML interface for Open‑Access journals (OAI-PMH 2.0) similar to RSS feeds
• Automated registration of a CrossRef DOI
• Automated submission of article metadata to the DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)
• Annotating articles with terms from the GND (German: Gemeinsame Normdatei)
• Storing the author's affiliation for each article

Used Technologies

All WordPress plugins are implemented in PHP. Metadata is exported in various XML formats and sometimes converted via XSLT. The communication with both CrossRef and DOAJ is implemented using their respective REST APIs. GND terms are loaded from the lobid.org service. A Docker development environment allows all plugins to be tested.

Scope of Services

The following services were provided during the project:

• Consulting regarding possible solutions when managing and exporting metadata
• Implementation of the WordPress plugins
• Documentation and publishing of all plugins as Open‑Source software
• Installation and maintenance of all plugins in the production system