Great idea! Although I get the CaRP name now many people don’t. It does tend to conjur up visions of ugly, garbage eating fish. A great product should have a great name and it’s time for a re-branding of CaRP. Best of luck to all but especially me in the contest:)

A better approach would be to have an end Of Life strategy for CaRP, and develop a similar yet superior product under the new name. If you want to have backwards capability to CaRP that’s OK, but not absolutely neccessary.

Either way you choose, I wish you continued success. I just would hope you reconsider this proposed name change.

Don’t worry, although for example, the name of carp.php will change to something else, I’ll be creating a new file named carp.php containing functions with all the same names as the one’s you’re using which will simply call the renamed functions. It’ll be a teensy weensy bit slower (probably entirely unnoticable), and will provide backwards compatibility for the majority of uses.

You’ll be able to upload the new files into your existing “carp” folder, so except in rare cases, you won’t have to make any adjustments to the code in your webpages.

If your code is doing things like accessing $carpconf directly (rather than using the CarpConf function), then you might have to make a few adjustments, but I’m sure I can make those sorts of problems rare.

I’m not quite sure I’ve understood your comment about paying for it under the new name correctly, but in case I have, I’ll respond. When the name changes, the update will be free to all version 4.x users. It’ll probably be released as “NewName 4.1″.

Actually my middle name is Eric, and the winner is getting three products :-). I won’t begrudge anyone not participating if they feel that’s not a big enough prize.

I thought about this for a while before deciding to change the name, because as you say, the CaRP name is fairly well established. Here’s my thinking:

1) I won’t simply delete any of the CaRP webpages — I’ll either put links on them to the new product’s pages or use permanent redirects, which would pass the benefit of any existing links to the new pages.

2) If people who know the CaRP name go looking for it, it will be easy enough to let them know the name has changed and point them to the new webpages.

3) If people who don’t know the CaRP name go looking for an RSS to HTML converter or a script to automatically add content to their pages or a script to insert their latest blog posts into pages all over their website or whatever they want a script like CaRP for, “CaRP” isn’t going to jump out at them as the name of a solution to their problems.

I expect that far more of my future sales are going to go to people who’ve never heard of CaRP than to people who already have. That’s why I think it’s worth the trouble of changing the name to something that communicates what the product is for more effectively. I guess we’ll see whether I was right soon.

By the way, I am working on several new products, and have a million more ideas that I’ll be moving onto once they’re done. Renaming CaRP isn’t going to affect the schedule of other projects all that much.

* You don’t have to follow me on Twitter to win.

* Where applicable, the winner will get a single user license to the product.

* If the winner selects a prize that usually requires a periodic subscription fee (eg. $X per month…), the prize will be one free year of service.

When I say “squatters”, what I’m talking about is anyone who’d watch a contest like this and snatch up domains for any good suggestions they see with the intent of trying to sell the winner to me for some ridiculous price. In my mind, that’s a lot different than thinking up good domain names yourself, registering them, and seeing if you can make a profit off them (which can be done in multiple ways to which I’d certainly have no objection).

I’ve updated the post and my earlier comment to use language that more precisely conveys the point I was attempting to make.