The capital_P_dangit() Function in WordPress

Over the years, an interesting debate has sparked in the WordPress community.Using a lowercase ‘p’ in the name is considered a crime by many WordPress enthusiasts.Well, technically.

But, why?

In WordPress 3.0, Matt Mullenweg included a function named “capital_P_dangit()” using a filter which changed a lowercase ‘p‘ automatically into an uppercase one when used with WordPress in any content, page or post title and comments text.

The WordPress Codex describes it as:

Violating our coding standards for a good function name.

Below is the code, you can view it here.

Problems with this approach

For example, ‘WordPress'(lowercase p) was changed into ‘WordPress’.(uppercase P)

Matt made this code change without any approval or open discussion with the community which was in itself unacceptable to a lot of people as WordPress is supposed to be or is because of the community.
In a way, WordPress was having control over the content people were writing which defeated the purpose of freedom.
This particular function could break certain things like the URLs on some sites as Justin Tadlock stated in his blog post back then.

You can see a discussion of the community in this ticket on WordPress.org.

Trust Issues

Back in May 2013 WP TAVERN actually conducted a survey in one of their blog posts by Jeff Chandler asking people whether they would trust a company that misspelled ‘WordPress.’

66% of people had trust issues.As Jeff Stated:

Members of the community point out their mistake and while generally it’s enough to get a good laugh, it’s usually followed up with “can’t trust or work with a company that can’t even spell the name of the software correctly“.

I agree with him.

How did Matt Mullenweg Respond to the reactions?

On the WP-Hackers Mailing list thread, here is what Matt had to say:

As I said before, you are in /complete control/ of your site. It’s a single line to remove a filter. If you don’t like the filter, vote with your feet or with a plugin. If the function cause a non-trivial number of people to avoid 3.0, leave WP, or install a plugin to deactivate I would seriously reconsider it. In the absence of that, there are a 1,001 better places to focus my attention with regards to WordPress.

Reference: Automatically Correcting The WordPress Mistake – WP TAVERN

How to remove this filter?

There are 2 ways.

Install a plugin.

Here is one by Tom Lany but it was last updated a year ago.

Remove WordPress to WordPress filter

Add the code below to your theme’s functions.php file.I’d recommend you to use a child theme before you do so to prevent your changes from being overwritten after a theme update.

remove_filter( 'the_title', 'capital_P_dangit', 11 );
remove_filter( 'the_content', 'capital_P_dangit', 11 );
remove_filter( 'comment_text', 'capital_P_dangit', 31 );