Justin Tadlock brought to my attention a WordPress debate which is frustrating a lot of WordPress bloggers. Shortly before WordPress 3 was released a function was added to WordPress called capital_P_dangit() which changes ‘WordPress’ to ‘WordPress’ i.e. replaces a lowercase p to uppercase P (this is known as CamelCasing). This was done to ensure that users correctly capitalise the W and P when referring to the WordPress brand name.
Many of you may be surprised that the addition of such a small function could cause a debate in the first place. There are 3 reasons why people are getting annoyed about this function:
- Normally all major changes are added to WordPress via the track ticket system. However this function was added to the core files without being debated by any developers.
- The function is breaking URL’s. There’s currently a ticket opened which states that an uploaded image called WordPressLogo_blue-m.png doesn’t work because it was changed to WordPressLogo_blue-m.png by the function. This is clearly a major problem and needs to be addressed.
- To quote Justin.
The real issue is not the bug; it’s the display of content that people didn’t write.
Surely it isn’t WordPress’s place to change any of our content, even if it is wrong.
You can manually remove the capital_P_dangit() function and there is a plugin to remove it too however the main issue here is still whether the function should be there in the first place.
I can fully understand why they want to stop millions of bloggers incorrectly spelling their brand name though I have to agree with Justin in this one as I don’t think that it is their place to change anyones content forcefully.
What do you think: Do you think WordPress have the right to change references to them?
Kevin
This is hilarious! For real!? Hahaha... I just tried it on one of my blogs, and sure enough, when you type "Wordpress" (with a lowercase "p"), it automatically gets changed to a capital "P" on the site (although it still stays as a lowercase "p" in your WP editor)... LOL... Crazy.
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
Like