Should your CMS be allowed to do that?

I happen to love WordPress. Its features and sheer variety of plugins makes it ideal not just for blogs but for a whole range of sites. Having worked with many CMSes, both opern source and proprietary, I think WP strikes the best balance between features and ease of use.

However, recently there has been quite an uproar within the WP community. Matt Mullenweg, the head of the WordPress project that he started in 2002 as a fork of another software called B2, has recently added a filter in the core codebase that automatically replaces any occurrence of the word “Wordpress”  with the ‘proper’ capitalization, that is “WordPress”.

Here’s the code in its entirety:

/**
 * Forever eliminate "Wordpress" from the planet (or at least the little bit we can influence).
 *
 * Violating our coding standards for a good function name.
 *
 * @since 3.0.0
 */
 function capital_P_dangit( $text ) {
 	       return str_replace( 'Wordpress', 'WordPress', $text );
 }

This filter runs completely in the background. At no point are the users informed of this change, nor are they given the chance to turn it off from the UI. To make things worse, the filter is applied to all existing articles and comments and changes everything, including file paths, resulting in broken images, non-working links and more.

I believe that no software should be allowed to do that. What I write and how I write it is my sole responsibility. If I want to misspell “Wordpress” or “Micro$oft” or “Gøøgle”, that’s my business and if a program wants to help me, I should have the opportunity to turn it off from the UI. For exanple, WordPress has automatic emoticon parsing, but that can be easily turned off.

Some people have argued that it’s a minor change and we should respect trademarks anyway. Well, the software’s logo is written with small caps, like this: WordPress. And why stop here? Once the developers think they know better, they can start automatically censoring “bad words”, or fix incorrect usage of “its” vs. “it’s”. It’s all for a good cause, right?

This matter can be resolved relatively easy with a plugin – Remove Wordpress to WordPress filter, but the whole issue leaves me with a bitter taste in my mouth. Ego-driven decisions are always problematic and unfortunately open source projects are not immune.

Some have called this censorship. While I think this word to be too strong, it’s definitely pedantry.

Further reading:

• “Wordpress” being turned into CamelCase “WordPress” breaks URLs – WordPress trac
• Lowercase p, dangit! by Justin Tadlock
• Automatically Correcting The Wordpress Mistake