The Realtor® Trademark Fixer Wordpress Plugin
Posted by John Lockwood on June 17th, 2008
Are you respecting the Realtor® trademark?
Maybe you’re mad at NAR and you don’t care if you add the trademark symbol or not, but for most of us, we don’t mind (and consider it a lower risk proposition) to go ahead and put the trademark on there. Realtor®, as you may know, is a registered trademark of the National Association of Realtors®.
The trouble for bloggers is that many bloggers don’t know how to type the trademark symbol, and even for those that do, typing that stupid “®” every time is a pain in the neck. But don’t worry, the plugin makes it simple. Install it, then go ahead and type the r-word (in either lower case or upper case), and the plugin will automatically correct your usage.
Installation: Just download the plugin, unzip it into your Wordpress plugin directory, activate it on the Manage Plugins page, and you’re good to go! No warranty is provided, including fitness for use. Enjoy!
Current Release
The 1.4 Release (final?) leaves hyphenated forms (realtor-whatever or whatever-realtor) alone. This is important as we found out because Wordpress permalinks frequently use hyphens, and people couldn’t link to this post. Now a link to this post will work!
Version 1.3 added the Realtor® Fix Plugin Test Page, which you can visit to see how the plugin will transform your posts. Because it’s pretty well tested, the plugin offers a simple switch (see the plugin code) for enabling comment filtering if you want. However, it still ships with comment filtering disabled by default. This version offers improved matching code, so most URLs with some version of “Realtor®” in them should work well without using the “[sic]” to disable adding the trademark. However, adding the “[sic]” is still supported. Finally, this version also offers support for capitalizing the REALTOR® trademark. Simply type it in all caps (REALTOR®) and it will do the right thing. If you capitalize the first letter or don’t capitalize anything, you’ll get “Realtor®”.
The 1.2 Release added two features: First, if you add “[sic]” after the r-word it will suppress adding the trademark (but remove the “[sic]“). Thus, if you need to link to realtor.com, use http://www.realtor.com. Secondly, comments are not processed. A few minutes after I had the plugin installed a user used the r-word in a url, and it was transformed. Users commenting shouldn’t have to know the rules of use.
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