When you submit a new plugin to the WordPress.org directory, one of the things that can easily trip you up is the name you’ve chosen for your plugin (and a quick way to get a rejection).

You can spend a long time crafting the perfect name to use but, when it includes a trademarked name, it gets tricky. Very quickly.

This year I submitted a plugin which embedded Threads into your post. I knew that trademarks couldn’t be used as the initial part (no more “YouTube Embed” – one of my much, much earlier plugins, before a lot of the current guidelines were put into place), so I named it “Embed Threads”. The idea is that nobody should believe this is official (which it feels more like if the trademarked name is at the beginning). Anyway, it was rejected. Let’s try and understand why it was and why, in this case, it actually benefited me.

This is the full description, given in the “Detailed Plugin Guidelines” about naming your plugin…

The use of trademarks or other projects as the sole or initial term of a plugin slug is prohibited unless proof of legal ownership/representation can be confirmed. For example, the WordPress Foundation has trademarked the term “WordPress”and it is a violation to use “wordpress” in a domain name. This policy extends to plugin slugs, and we will not permit a slug to begin with another product’s term.

For example only employees of Super Sandbox should use the slug “super-sandbox,” or their brand in a context such as “Super Sandbox Dancing Sloths.” Non-employees should use a format such as “Dancing Sloths for Superbox” instead to avoid potentially misleading users into believing the plugin was developed by Super Sandbox. Similarly, if you don’t represent the “MellowYellowSandbox.js” project, it’s inappropriate to use that as the name of your plugin.

Original branding is recommended as it not only helps to avoid confusion, but is more memorable to the user.

17. Plugins must respect trademarks, copyrights, and project names.

Yeah, okay, I obviously didn’t read this before coming up with “Embed Threads” (which, again, in the past would have been fine). So, according to these rules, I can call it “Embed Post for Threads”, or something. Right?

Wrong.

It turns out Meta are a bit more of a special snowflake when it comes to all of this, and won’t even allow this (none of which is mentioned in the documentation, so even if you follow all of the above rules, you could still end up being rejected). Basically, you can’t use the title of any of their properties in your plugin name at all (and, remember, this isn’t retrospective, before you start shouting out the names of various “Facebook” named plugins).

Interestingly, in the email that the plugins review team sends you, it states this…

Be advised, your display name may not begin with any trademarked terms, nor use them in a manner that might imply a relationship. This often includes portmanteau when meant to reference trademarks for another entity.

So, this shows the old advice that you’re generally okay just as long as you don’t START the name with the trademark (different to the above which suggests the “for” suffix).

But they do also say…

Some trademarks have stricter enforcement laws than others.

Yeah, and knowing this in advance would be real helpful, if you’re waiting 2-3 months for a review.

Without enough thought, I came up with “Social Post Embed”. It’s so damn generic it’s accepted but tells people absolutely ZERO about what the plugin is for.

Longer term, though, it turned out to be a good thing, when I came across another small social media site that had embedding options but didn’t (currently) work with WordPress. So I added this second social media company to the plugin and now it’s no longer Threads-specific. In this case, making it generic opened up the plugin to be used for other things. Next, I’m hoping to add Mastodon.