To WordPress and not to WordPress

Having been overwhelmed with Olympic fever, it’s been awhile since I’ve made a post relating to WordPress, but the community is as active as ever, especially with the release of WordPress 2.6.1 and the final round of voting for the WordPress Plugin Competition.

This will, fortunately for you all, be a short post with what maybe a catchy title! The good book ‘how to write a good blog post’ sites teach us that a catchy title is very helpful in attracting the attention of browsers. Whether this will be one of the popular posts as a result remains to be seen, but there is a point to this post and the title: it turns out I have been spelling that special word wrong.

That word, of course, is:

WordPress

I’ve always spelt it as WordPress, and never thought more of it, so I was utterly mortified when I started reading Lorelle‘s excellent article Tips on Writing Good WordPress Tips. The first point she made (as convincingly as always) was that:

WordPress is a trademark and thus must be spelled appropriately.

That sentence came like a bolt from the heavens (or stepping on a garden rake) and I was left with a sinking feeling in my stomach – just hours before I had chided someone on the WordPress Forums about getting the name of a plugin wrong, and yet I was already making an even more fundamental mistake about something I read about almost everyday – WordPress!

That feeling of guilt happened to coincide with me reading a new post by Mark Ghosh on WLTC called Be Kind, Educate, (which is just as inspirational as Matt Mullenweg‘s Price of Freedom) where he analyses why there are so many fans of WordPress, and nature of the WP community. His last point, and the title of his article, credits Lorelle as an inspiration for his new pledge:

to be as kind as I can be … to educate everyone that cares to listen

So at the end of this post, not only am I going to spell WordPress correctly from now on, I am also going to endeavour to be a lot more patient and polite when I reply on the forums!

p/s: Apologies to anyone I’ve offended on the forums from before.

p/s2: I think I’ve patched up this site for WordPress, but if you spot any omissions, please let me know!

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3 comments on “To WordPress and not to WordPress
  1. Jonny Nguyen says:

    yes, I absolutely agree with you, I am working on it too, check out my site to learn more, thanks

  2. Lorelle says:

    Glad the lightning bolt smacked you. 😀 It is a sign of respect, as is respecting trademarks from all as they wish. Automattic is really fair and fairly open about the abuse of the WordPress name. They don’t nag about misspellings, though the community can’t stand when it is miss-capped, but they are particular about the use of WordPress in domain names. That’s a deal breaker.

    I love that so many people get so excited about all they are learning about WordPress, they want to share that love with others, even if they don’t blog about such topics on a regular basis. Many think there is money to be made by having a new WordPress-oriented blog. But it’s hard, as you have found out. By labeling your blog WordPress, writing about unrelated subjects frustrates those who desire only WordPress news and techniques. You are really restricted.

    Finding something new to bring to the WordPress table is hard. Good luck to you for digging into the fun of WordPress and sharing your novel approach with others, and supporting the WordPress community. We need some fresh perspectives and energy to keep the jazz going about WordPress. WordPress is still using training wheels and I see it growing even more powerful in time. I’m so thrilled to be just a small part of that energy, aren’t you? 😀

  3. flick says:

    Thanks Jonny and Lorelle for your kind comments and apologies for the late reply.

    I’m very excited about being part of such a vibrant community (even though keeping up with the pace of development can be quite time consuming!) and I think it is very encouraging for newcomers to WordPress to have leaders in the field who are passionate about WordPress (e.g. Lorelle) , people that they can look up to and draw inspiration from, as well as fellow bloggers (e.g. Jonny) who use WP and add different perspectives.

    I think I will be more considered when rambling about subjects other than WordPress (thank you for the comment about frustrating readers who are here for WP) and now can understand Jeffr0’s perspective more as well. I will most probably move such ramblings to a /blog subdomain (more reading to do!) but this is very sound advice, so thank you!

    p/s: I had a brief fangirl moment when I saw the Lorelle had left a comment! ZOMG! And ZOMG again!

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