Capital W Capital P

I have blogged before about WordPress 3.0 and all the new features packed into it. One that slipped past my overview and indeed slipped past almost all who have talked so much about this new version of wordpress is a nasty little bit of code hidden away and apparently surreptitiously included by the original developer of WordPress Matt Mullenweg in what some say is a personal mission.

The coe in question is fairly simple, and what it does is search all your posted content for the string ‘wordpress’ and ensures that it is in the ‘correct’ format with a capital W and capital P.

This code was applied by change set 14996 which includes the new function as seen below:

 /** 
* 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 ); 

The comments added to that function speaks volumes. It is rather ironic that from someone who preaches open source and allowing users to freely do what ever they wish with software and although it it a very minor point I do not see why they should insist that wordpress is written in the ‘correct’ format.

Matt Mullenweg claims that this small piece of code will not have any impact on users what-so-ever, however, it is clear that he is wrong. I have had the situation today where an apparent bug with a link cloaking script in my WordPress Datafeed Import Plugin was indeed this silly little function messing up the URLS. I have a test area on my server where I install many versions of WordPress so that I can test my scripts and plugins. These are all within a folder called WordPress all in lowercase. When the masked urls are created wordpress finds the wordpress string and changes the case. This in turn breaks the link as Linux platforms are case sensative.

Since I found this and doing a little more digging, I have found that there are reports of people having problems with images named WordPress and indeed others who have their wordpress install in a wordpress folder, find that any internal links in their site will no-longer work.

I really do not understand this position, yes if this is the way that Matt Mullenweg origionally intended WordPress to be written it must be frustrating to see it written otherwise.  However, it does not make any different for SEO, Google is not case sennsative. I agree that they should control the image and the wordpress logo, however, when it is text in a blog post like this, and you subscribe to the full ethos of open source software then this sort of tinkering and forcing the hand of the blogger is simply out of order.

Install the Remove WordPress to WordPress filter which will disable this silly little function…

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