How To Spell WordPress
UPDATE: The domain “wpcamelcase.com” is no longer mine. It is now some weird “casino” blog site. I’ll leave this post here for posterity purposes.
I launched a site called WPCamelCase to help people learn how to spell WordPress. This is something I’ve tried to passively promote on this site by spelling every instance of “WordPress” with a capital P.
The Spelling
WordPress is spelled in a CamelCase form. If you notice on any official WordPress websites, it is always spelled with a capital P, although as far as I know there is no real explanation as to . The most common misspellings are “WordPress” or “Word Press.”
Being in the community for a while, I personally cringe if I see it misspelled, and I’m sure the creators of WordPress do too, which is why a patch was introduced in WordPress 3.0 to automatically correct the lowercase P misspelling to an uppecase one, much to the opposition of certain members of the WordPress community.
The Problem
Unfortunately with the way it filters your content to convert WordPress to WordPress, it is possible to break links such as images or other URLs. For example:
- An image with the URL of http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/Wordpress-image.jpg would be renamed to http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/WordPress-image.jpg and a broken image would show up
- Your blog is installed in a directory called http://example.com/Wordpress, any of your internal links would be renamed to http://example.com/WordPress and you’d have a bunch of broken links
To “correct” this behavior, you can install the Remove WordPress to WordPress filter plugin.
Conclusion
Instead of forcing users to spell it correctly, I think it’s better to educate users on how to spell it, which is exactly why I made WPCamelCase.com along with my GPL-licensed haiku.
Adding this sort of code to the WordPress core doesn’t help the software at all, and probably makes it worse with the broken link issues people are reporting so far over something that is relatively inconsequential.
I usually don’t talk about these sort of semi-controversial, community-oriented issues here on my blog, because frankly, I think the majority of my audience, along with the vast majority of WordPress users, couldn’t care less about these things.
I thought it was worth mentioning due to the fact this addition to WordPress core has the possibility to break things.
Further Reading
- Lowercase p, dangit! by Justin Tadlock
- The dangit filter by Benjamin Bradley
- Automatically Correcting The WordPress Mistake by Jeff Chandler
- Changeset 14996 – The original trac ticket
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I thought adding it to the spell checker was enough tbh. Though Im fairly sure I spelt WordPress wrong a few times while writing posts, for instance like WrdPress, and it didnt pick up on it.. Kinda a drastic change dont ya think?
I think a good solution would be to integrate the proper spelling into another Automattic service like After the Deadline, which there is a plugin for.
I’m certainly no WordPress developer, but I do know for a fact that you don’t go changing someone else’s typo’s without first letting them know that you are going to.
I probably would never have seen this unless it was pointed out via WP Tavern or Justin Tadlock’s website.
Like people are saying, so much for community to have this fix forced upon without a community vote/discussion.
Some are arguing that WordPress already has been changing regular quotes into “curly quotes” although I’m pretty sure that doesn’t break anything in the process.
You spell it “WordPresss” in the third paragraph.
Was that deliberate?
Nope, that was an accident. Nice catch, thanks for letting me know.
Either you sold the CamelCase site or your domain has been hacked. It now opens to a casino site, on a different domain.
I let the domain expire. I removed the link to it from here to avoid any confusion.