Version 3.0 Features

Hello all. Not a frequent poster as I’ve been off pushing the envelope on other systems. But I’m back to looking at WP / MU as it is now supporting a lot of the features I needed to see happen.

Since this is a request list, let me throw in a couple of wishes, as their lack has been big drawbacks to making things happen with WP.

1. Front end editing with a rich editor.
This is probably the biggest thing you could possibly do to increase the appeal of WP to the general public. While there is a Front End Editor plugin, that author doesn’t want to implement a rich editor as they believe front-end editing shouldn’t have a rich editor. I even once offered to support the effort, but it was a no go. So at this time, all WP authors are still forced into using the backend editor, which is a bad, scary place for someone who doesn’t want to do (or know how to do) anything but post and edit content. Let the poor users stay on the front end and do their thing, and everyone will be much happier with WP.

2. “Nice” invites. Provide a feature to allow all roles to invite people to a lesser role (editor can invite someone to author, author invites to subscribe, subscriber invites someone to comment). This would make it much easier for blog authors to build up discussions of topics by inviting other authors to throw in on the subject and for readers to bring their friends over to the discussion.

There’s more, but those are the two biggest “user-side” ones I have personal experience with.

As many others have noted, the WP + WPMU merge is clearly the biggest feature target for 3.0.

Beyond that, a general goal that I’ve had for WP for awhile is the continued expansion of the external APIs, XML-RPC and AtomPub. The ideal end goal is to expose all of the same options and data that wp-admin provides. We are still quite a ways from that point, but with each release I’ve been trying to chip away at it.

This seems a pivotal moment. The merge of wpmu and wp is absolutely right in my view. But if it is not given the space and time it needs, it could be disastrous.

I agree with the earlier poster that such a merger is sufficient for v3 with additions to follow.

Just found this string… here is what I would like to see added to 3.0:
It would be VERY helpful if WP could have a native admin console to manage user rights, especially when it comes to:

– Managing what users see in the wp-admin page, based on role
> e.g. only certain dashboard widgets
> e.g. only their posts
> hide all site-wide stats on posts, etc.

– Setting file size limits for uploads
– Restricting uploads to specific file formats

There are many people that want more CMS features and others that want to keep the code base small and quick. Perhaps a solution is to implement the main CMS functionality in core (such as custom post types) and create a canonical plugin for the rest of the CMS features.

This canonical plugin can be bundled with WP, not installed by default, but a note on the homepage similar to the note about changing your password could direct new users to enable it.

Some things this canonical CMS plugin could support are:
– better internal content linking (ie RB Internal Links plugin)
– ability to change the name of a page in a menu (ie. Page Menu Editor plugin)
– ability to exclude pages from the menu system
– better reordering of pages (ie. Pagemash plugin) as well as categories
– the ability to have basic and advanced mode for the wysisyg editor. In advanced mode any html you write will be preserved.
– allow admins to control what users see in the back end to simplify their experience
– bread crumbs functionality (ie. Yoast Breadcrumbs plugin)
– Enhance wp_list_pages() so you can specify a start depth. Useful for showing secondary and tertiary navigation independently from primary navigation. (ie. List Pages at Depth plugin)
– an option to redirect a parent page to the first child page, so that website menus work similar to computer menus. (This can currently be done with page templates but it is awkward)
– bare bones, not bloated, links to the main social websites and social bookmarking tools.
– ability to redirect a page to another url – useful when creating menus that go to other places. (ie. Page Links To plugin)
– ability to easily make Pages the first link after Dashboard (not Posts). (ie. pages-on-top plugin)

it would be great to have ONE plugin that did all these things, and perhaps more, where you could simply turn on and off each feature. Because the plugin would be canonical it would work with every new WP upgrade because it would be tested before release (the essence of canonical plugins).

i bet a lot of people would jump on board to make this happen. With a trac system in place the above plugin authors could join their work together into one plugin and others could help find bugs, and assit with development. we would be in wordpress cms heaven ??

@paulox – great idea about adopting some of the advanced CMS features of a system like Plone
@designodyssey – thumbs up on creating a 2×2 matrix about which items to implement, and doing the easiest, most requested first, them move to a few of the more difficult ones. and ditching the least requested most difficult. This thread is the source of that.

I also think that domain mapping with the MU integration would be killer.

As well, a default theme that is very well organized, well coded, and commented could be a great starter for new comers. A simplified version of Thematic would be great.

many thanks to all the awesome wordpress developers out there!

Add to core request: https://munashiku.slightofmind.net/wordpress-plugins/simple-bot-registration-protection

watermarking is an important feature that can be built into a 2.9.x version as you have already recognized the need to managed media in wordpress sites with 2.9.

if not, this is one feature i think is a must in 3.0

No 2.9 compatible plugin does a good job of handling watermarking.

I know this sounds like some hard work, but I sincerely hope it will be possible – improve the posting interface. It’s good, but it can definitely be better. Think about it, if only the posting interface in WordPress can make us dump software such as Windows Live Writer, I’m sure most aspiring bloggers will switch to WordPress.

In addition, WordPress can use some more Ajax in manage posts/pages screen too, just like the widgets page. Users should be able to change categories, edit tags, or move page orders on one page without going to another. For example, to assign a post to a category, the user can simply pull the category name over the post title.

A critical feature that WordPress is missing is a standard Photo Gallery tool that allows for HTML (non Flash) photo galleries embedded directly into posts and pages.

I would like to see the adoption and standardization of DM Albums into WordPress as it’s standard photo gallery tool. Thanks to continual feedback from the community, what started as a simple in-line photo album tool has become a fully integrated and customizable photo album management system that has the following features:

• Fully integrated with Post editor
• Photo Uploading
• Drag-n-Drop Photo sorting
• Caption editing
• One-Click insertion into post
• Fully customizable UI (needs visual editor)

For a full demo, please visit the Demo Site and please vote for this feature!

First, I’d like to echo @jonpeltier:

Could you once and for all really and truly stop the visual editor from changing HTML code that I enter into the HTML editor? Please?

This issue is a huge obstacles to many bloggers who, for legitimate reasons, want to add html to their posts but also use the visual editor.

Second, I want to add my support for requests to make the wp/wpmu integration a priority. As someone who uses both, integration of the two would be a major step forward in making it easier for me to maintain my sites.

Great to see you guys are taking a positive step forward in managing the project :>. This combined with the idea of core plugins puts you way out in front of most open source projects out there in my books.

If 3.0 only includes the merge of MU I would be happy, god knows there will be enough testing involved in that alone.

Focus on the WPMU – WP merger. I’d imagine it’s going to be quite a task and needs to work flawlessly. The new default theme should be considered as part of this merger. I think those two are probably enough ‘big’ things.

Once 3.0 is out and WPMU functionality is in place, then the next item should be all the requests for more CMS types of improvements. Imagine how great it’ll be to manage multiple ‘sites’ (instead of just basic blogs) all from the same installation. Since WP is headed in the CMS direction, I think the WPMU merger is crucial to that next step and should be focused on first before adding all the CMS specific things.

And finally canonical plugins I think should be next. Things like better media management and photo albums/galleries should be a canonical plugin in my opinion and not in core.

A lot of comments. I have tried to scan through most.

I have a few concerns about the merger of WP and WPMU. I am anxious to see what is in store. I hope this merger will not break a good thing.

I have used WP for quite a while. A few years ago I began to develop Church and Ministry sites and I knew early on that I did not want multiple installs. Originally I installed WPMU. It wasn’t up a month or so and I hand to change host providers. That was some time ago so I do not remember the control panels I moved from or to, but WPMU just would not function after move so I loaded WP and added approximately 10 lines of code to WP-config file and has worked for at least 3 years. As hosting prices changed I have probably changed hosting a dozen times with no headaches. I could use wildcards and a single sql, but I do not want new blogs set up so easy. I have it where I have to use the control panel to create new sql and setup an addon tld or subdomain so not just anyone could create a new blog. Everything works with tld’s and subdomains without any changes to WP-config or any other files. I have tailored a lot of things through themes and plugins for different ministries without touching core.

This has been the simplest setup for a long time and have been able to upgrade core and all plugins with no snags or delays. I hope if anything the merger would make things even easier and not break things. When will we get a glimpse of the merger details?
Although my setup works extremely well and I could be content with it for a long time. One thing I miss with my setup is allow full admins to each blog. If I could do all that I am currently doing and then as an SuperAdmin be able to setup individual blogadmins to each manage their own blog where SuperAdmin could choose which plugin and which theme is visible to each blog. That would be good.

Hi,

I don’t know if this has been covered anywhere else…..

I would like a facility to have a Tag cloud generated automatically for the occurrence of content on Pages (not Posts).
There is a Tagging facility currently for Posts but nothing for Pages. I tried one plugin but it wouldn’t install.

I’m using WP more as a CMS and cannot find a solution to getting aa Tag cloud generated.

We desperately need a Menu generator feature. We can’t rely on page list and category list anymore.

We need something like Drupal menus. From inside Admin area, be able to create any number of independent menus we want, and add to each of them any post, page, category, tag, and any WordPress resource that can be accessed from a URL, together with custom HTML code with PHP and shortcode support.

Each li element and each ul/ol nested submenu would allow custom classes and id to be inserted, propagating or not to its children. With the same great support body_class, post_class and comment_class has.

I also suggest it to not be added to core. It should come as a plugin to be activated, and focused being an API, so that it can be expanded by other plugins, with new features and UI improvements. That’s a nice suggestion for one of first canonical plugin!

Doing so, core developers wouldn’t need to develop all those features alone. They could develop really its base and a simple UI, and other developers would use API’s functions, actions and filters to implement all kinds of new features above the base plugin.