Revision as of 21:52, 23 January 2008

FCKeditor, The Name

The FCK letters in FCKeditor are the initials of Frederico Caldeira Knabben, the project starter and lead developer of FCKeditor.

Frederico was used to use "fckVarName" while developing to indicate temporary things he introduced in the code. While living in Rome, his Italian co-workers were used to play with him point things like the "FCK Thing" because of it, so, in the late 2002, he decided to call his editor project "FCKeditor", as it fitted well with his friends jokes. The name sounded good in any case.

The Problem

Well, "FCKeditor" doesn't sounds always good really. It depends on the person reading it.

For native English speakers (Frederico is Brazilian), the FCK letters combined together are a shortcut for a bad word (probably the most used bad word in English). This information came to Frederico too late, after 2 years of FCKeditor, and the project was already too diffuse and mature to think about changing its name.

Many will say that the name is not a problem. The important is the quality of the software. This is true, but many others will feel the overall editor quality lower just because of that name fact. People may not understand how serious we are about FCKeditor, not taking use seriously because of it.

Rebranding

Changing the editor name right now is an extremely complex task. In the marketing point of view, it may be a bad decision, but it depends on the benefits it could bring.

We feel that we need to face this change. We want to make our editor perfect in all senses, so why not work on its name? We haven't yet taken definitive decisions about it yet, and no names have been chosen. Much talk is still to be done in this sense.