It’s WordPress with a capital ‘P’, dangit!

WordPress, wordpress, WordPress or wordPress? Which is it and what does it matter anyway? There seem to be so many ways of spelling the exact same name. Does it even matter?

According to the team at Automattic (developers of WordPress), yes it does.

With the release of WordPress 3.0 (and possibly long before on wordpress.com blogs) a filter exists entitled “capital_P_dangit()”. While this function has a rather humorous name, its purpose is rather straightforward and important to the developers. This function is applied to titles, content and comments in order to transform all instances of the word “WordPress” where the “P” is not capitalised (and the “W” is), into the correct format, namely “WordPress”.

When one looks at the WordPress logo, it is clear that there is an emphasis on the “W” and the “P”, even though all the letters are capitalised.

Why should we care?

This, folks, is an interesting notion. While reading further into this topic, I came across a comment on

Lorelle’s blog, mentioning the culture behind WordPress and its robust community.

With such a vast international scope of users, it is bound to occur that users spell the name of the software differently, almost in the way that people spell Catherine with a “K” and a “y”, or Tony with an “i” instead of a “y”. Although all the letters, in this instance, remain the same (can you imagine spelling “WordPress” with a “Q” in the middle?), the camel case letters in the name are, to the founders and team, a seemingly important piece of the brand’s identity and status within the WordPress community.

What if I want to spell it however I want to?

While many are up in arms around this filter and its inclusion in the WordPress core, one should take note that filters and actions in WordPress have been designed to be modified, “turned off” or removed by users without modifying the core. Thus, users are free to remove this filter if they so wish. With discussions around this filter breaking image paths and URLs, however, it could possibly be an idea that this function is refined somewhat to exclude instances of “WordPress” within URLs and image paths (users sometimes put uppercase letters in file names… go figure). As mentioned above, though, the filter will only run in instances when the word is capitalised as “WordPress” (note: no capital “P”, but a capital “W”).
How do I remove the ‘P’?

It’s really simple, actually. Place the following code in your theme’s “functions.php” file:

function capital_P_dangit_be_gone () { // Let me spell WordPress as WordPress foreach ( array( ‘the_content’, ‘the_title’, ‘comment_text’ ) as $filter ) { remove_filter( $filter, ‘capital_P_dangit’ ); } } // End capital_P_dangit_be_gone() add_action( ‘init’, ‘capital_P_dangit_be_gone’ )

What should we make of all this?

The creation and inclusion of this filter within the WordPress core looks to be an attempt at brand continuity. Seeing as it can be removed, I don’t feel that it’s too much of an inconvenience, like some users feel. The decision ultimately lies with each individual WordPress user as to whether or not they choose to leave or remove this filter.