/** * @article No Comic Sans, Dangit! Plugin * * @since July 10, 2010 * @package Wordpress Plugins * * @comments 3 comments * */
I’ve been reading the wp-hackers discussion list for a while. Generally its a cool place, where some of the sharpest people in the WordPress development community — both core committers and independent plugin/theme developers — share tips and tricks about hacking WordPress. Sometimes, though, the politics end up being way over the top.
The past week, there have been literally over 120 angry and embittered posts back and forth over a four line function called capital_P_dangit() hidden away in WordPress’s formatting.php file (the same place that handles converting “dumb quotes” to typographer’s quotes, changing -- to en dashes and --- to em dashes). Seems that some of the core developers wanted to enforce the correct spelling of the trademark “WordPress”. (Not Wordpress. Never that. Matter of fact, it took me a few minutes just to figure out how to write that just now and get around the filter.)
Friends don't let friends use Comic Sans.
There’s even a ticket on trac (can’t find it right now) that claims that all the extra processing cycles caused by searching for misspellings of “wordpress” are partly to blame for the Gulf oil spill. And, of course, the capital “P” in WordPress clubs baby seals.
Well, all this is well and good. But if you’re going to harness the power of pure evil, I figured you could at least do it for a more noble purpose. So I wrote a filter that bans all usage of Comic Sans in the post content. Don’t let your users pull a Dan Gilbert!
Future updates planned: An option to down-moderate comments by setting disruptive or hostile comments in Comic Sans.
Examples
- This is written in a
<span style="font-family: Comic Sans MS, Arial;">span tag. The entire font-family declaration is scrapped—users who are going to specify Comic Sans lose their priveleges to specify output intent. - This is written in a
<font face="Comic Sans MS">tag.
I approve of this plugin. Comic-Sans is a blight on humanity and it must be eradicated, at all costs.
Thanks, Otto. I knew I could count on support for this important initiative.
Learning a ton from these neat artciles.