What Should 2011 Hold for WordPress?

My suggestions are:

1. Better media handling when uploading videos. Now there’s only a link to an uploaded video – I want it embedded! You can specify sizes of images, why not with a video? I don’t want to fetch videos from youtube all the time… (also I should point out that the embed button has always been missing from my WP install which is weird…)

2. Drop the “hello dolly” plugin from core. It’s totally pointless. Also improve Akismet. I use a plugin called WP-Spamfree and it’s blocking thousands of spam everyday. Akismet let’s in a spam every now and then. I don’t like that…

3. When searching for a plugin in the directory (self-hosted), it should be specified if the plugin is compatible with your current version of WP. It’s very annoying when you have to click on the details to find out if it is compatible or not.

4. Make post formats a part of the admin UI, like links and pages are now.

5. Make it easier to keep the widgets in place when switching themes. I don’t like it when I have to check the widgets over and over again every time I change themes.

I guess that’s it for now. A lot of other stuff that others have mentioned sounds pretty good as well. +1 to all of you.

“I vote to keep Hello Dolly (because it serves as an simple introduction to plugin writing) and Akismet (because I hate spam).”

Hello Dolly is useless. User can download Akismet from Plugins Directory.

Focus on less updates – I spent more time updating wordpress in 2010 than I did blogging.

Focus on either fixing bbpress or make an exporter to phpbb / vbulletin / ipboard, etc – and kill it completely.

focus on fixing buddypress, or make an exporter to phpfox / dolphin – and kill it –

is videopress going to work (the code to make worpdress handle video upload / convert / embed) or is it going the way of bbpress as well?

seriously – updates to wordpress kill me. New functions could be plugins, and merge with new core twice a year max. Stop adding new stuff and fix the stuff that is already broken.

bbpress and buddypress need help or put them out of misery, it makes automatic look bad, and it makes all of the wordpress sites running with buddypress look bad.
I LOVE wordpress, but got more blogging done with 1.5

Some ideas posted previously:

• Make post formats a part of the admin UI
• Fix BuddyPress and integrate (part of) it into the core WordPress
• Support multiple domains when going multi blogs

Keep up the good work!

make WordPress multilingual in the core (there are some good stuff in both qtranslate and wpml)
it’s all I ask WordPress for a great 2011!

I vote for better/easier media handling. CSS3 is always nice. Dropping Hello Dolly is a great idea to lighten the load. Akismet is up in the air for me. +1 for WordPressLite.

I help a lot of people get started with WordPress and one need keeps coming up over and over. So many people want to have a front page with some intro content followed by posts. New users seem to expect it to be possible but have no idea how to accomplish it. This basic need is out of their beginner skill set because it usually requires creating a custom page template.

The current setting for the front page allows choosing a separate static front page and posts page. If they are both set to the same, a warning message that the pages should not be the same is shown. It’s a bit confusing because there is no explanation why and nothing to prevent the choice.

So why not make things more intuitive by allowing both to be the same and then outputting the page content followed by posts?

• better plugin uninstall, especially where the SQL is concerned
• speed improvements, as mentioned in other comments here
• Enable child themes in the theme repository
• The codex needs some love. It has become less user-friendly of late
• better media management. e.g. for older sites, how to add existing media on the server into the media manager?
• the blogroll feature has hardly ever changed. Might it be time to revisit the possibilities here?

• Better gallery options, we shouldn’t have to go hunting for attachment codes to hide images. Take the lead from NexGen.
• Clarification of terminology. Custom Posts, Custom Fields and more with 3.1 what is the differences in clear English and when should we use them?
• Multisite – Better documentation and management. I realise it’s first integration but it does feel a bit rough sometimes and nearly impossible to get good documentation about what all the options are or do.
• Better CMS features – make clearer the features that are there.
• Core functionality update- Some of the features feel half finished such as galleries and media support. Remove anything that’s not needed or dated
• Approach more plug-in developers where appropriate to integrate popular plug-ins into the core to either replace existing functionality or compliment it, such as Nexgen, Contact forms, Anti-Spam etc.
• Consider Wizards or create an introduction to WordPress for new users. You have a excellent and reasonably friendly engine here, go the extra mile and give them a tour. Not sure how practical this is.
• TinyMCE – come up with a better editor that doesn’t screw up formatting, and/or improve the interface. Allow us to re-arrange the palettes so we have space for editing

Get some professionals into the forums especially for advanced stuff. I put up a post a few weeks back asking how to optimise WordPress calls, database queries and other stuff. If this already exists make it easier to find. If you want people to create theme give us some best practices to build upon. Same for plug-ins which to be honest can cause problems. I know you have a theme review and there is docs but sometimes it’s difficult to find what you need or the information is just out of date, and people won’t always realise this.

Another bug bear is the lack of checksum updates, I’ve seen over the last year a lot of issues with corrupted themes, plug-ins and so on taking out sites leading to a lot of woe and panic amongst users. Surely there is a better system of updating or in the worst case some kind of fail-safe mode?

If you want people to create theme give us some best practices to build upon.

Like Theme_Review? ??

A few things that I’d like to see:

1: Reinstatement of the Link Category Hierarchy thing;
2: An Incoming Links dashboard widget that actually works properly;
3: Peace on Earth and Goodwill to All.

I’d imagine that item 1 would be a doddle whereas items 2 and 3 might be equally difficult.

Improve usability for journalists/writers.

I Am Not A Programmer, but I’ve been using WordPress since version 1.5 or so. I’ve seen redesigns of the Add/Edit Post/Page UI that struck me as more attractive and usable than previous versions, and yet I’ve always experienced writing on WordPress as quite repulsive and discouraging. Still do.

(Writing on some other app and then copy-pasting or importing into WordPress is also pretty repulsive.)

The Add/Edit UI is built on a certain paradigm of How We Write, and that paradigm is completely unnatural to me. The existing paradigm enables writers who start at the beginning and go until they reach the end. If you tend to write the middle or final paragraph first, you end up scrolling a great deal. …And my writing is even less linear than that, but I can think of a few changes that would help many nonlinear writers without breaking anything for the linear writers:

* A button to toggle an expanded and editable view of the draft in the Add/Edit Post screen.

As a result, scrolling the add/edit page would mean scrolling the article I’m writing. This may also be an improvement for users with disabilities?

* Split a draft Post into multiple Posts (also in the Add/Edit Post screen).

In Adobe Acrobat, you can split a PDF along its top-level bookmarks with just a couple of clicks of the mouse/keyboard. I’d like a similar capability in WordPress.

Say I’m writing a very long article and I suddenly realize it should be four separate articles. I’d like to insert a <!–split–> in the appropriate places of the draft, then press publish. WordPress publishes the top section of the article, down to the first <!–split–>, and dumps each of the remaining three sections into a new draft Post.

* Concatenate drafts with just a couple of button clicks in the Edit Posts screen.

The Excerpt View option is a helper here, but a Full Text View would be even better.

* Full Text View.

In which you’d see all the text of each post listed, with paragraph/line breaks. (One hopes that the full text will be as wide as the entire list/table, rather than merely the width of the title column, as Excerpt View does now.)

These last two changes would make the Edit Posts screen into a rudimentary pasteboard/corkboard for users who need a visual metaphor to help them organize their text.

* all of the above for Pages (and Custom Post Types?), too.

[Deleted digression about mind-mapping and note-taking apps, etc. I have many thoughts, y’all.]

1. Have additional choices to customize admin colors other than 2

2. built in flexibility to utilize 1,2, or 3 columns on a page or post

3. send all plugins through tests for correct coding to run optimally as so they don’t slow down our sites before they are released

4. Rewrite procedures so that newbie can understand them. though ‘code is poetry’ not everyone knows how to write it

Thank you

O, I forgot the plugins once they are released should have a certification, and the willingness of the author to support it

Oh, just 1 more… amend the time a caption box is open until the cursor is removed from the source. and speed is a big issue

Thanks