Lowercase p, dangit! WordPress Controversy

There has recently been a new piece of code added to the WordPress core which makes sure that people spell WordPress correctly – automatically correcting misspellings (ie. making the P in the middle uppercase).

On its own this seems harmless enough but there has been a lot of talk in the WordPress community about it over the last couple of days. Summed up the key issues are:

• The plugin is breaking urls such as links and image paths
• WordPress is modifying content without permission
• The change was made silently as if it was being ‘sneaked in’

Speaking personally – I did once run a plugin on here that did exactly the same thing, and I removed it for the main reason above – ie it broke stuff. Apparently there have been some fixes made that improve the word detection so hopefully this will be a smaller issue in future updates, but still – it’s not the best thing to do.

Removing it is relatively easy. Just add the filters below to your theme or download and install this plugin:

remove_filter ('the_content', 'capital_P_dangit');
remove_filter ('the_title', 'capital_P_dangit');
remove_filter ('comment_text', 'capital_P_dangit');

Justin Tadlock has a complete write-up of all the problems about the automatic correction of the spelling of WordPress – well worth a read.

So what do you think of this change? Is it acceptable – or is it stepping over the line?

How was it for you? Let me know on BlueSky or Mastodon

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