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Although WordPress 2.7 recently got released, the developers are already at work, taking ideas and suggestions for WordPress 2.8. I’m a big fan if WordPress, but there are still areas where it needs improvement. Most of these improvements can be made with plugins, but plugins can later lead to compatibility issues. Here are a few key aspects where WordPress needs improvement, and a link to a plugin that solves the problem.
OpenID Support
Getting people to comment on a blog can be tough. No one wants to be bother entering their name, email, and website. That’s why OpenID support would be great. All visitors would have to do is enter their OpenID identity, and they would be logged in. Facebook Connect support would be even better!
Advanced Custom Fields
As I said in a previous post, WordPress has support for custom fields, but it’s features are limited. I use a plugin called “Get Custom Field Values” that works great, but it would be nice if it was built in.
Built in Caching
WordPress is infamous for falling to the digg effect. Caching wouldn’t solve the problem, but it sure would help. Sparkplugging has a great article to help WordPress handle a lot of traffic. On doDesign, I use a plugin called Super Cache.
Improvements to the Gallery
WordPress has a gallery feature, but there is not much to it. All it lets you do is show thumbnails of a few images, plus a link to see them larger. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has an awesome gallery on his site. Maybe we can except something similar in the future. For now, however, there’s NextGEN Gallery.
Seperate Feeds for Categories/Tag/Author
By default, WordPress has two feeds: a post feed, and a comment feed. It would be great to have more options. For example, if someone wants to only subscribe to posts tagged as “personal,” they’ll notice that they can’t. Here’s a large list of WordPress plugins for feeds.
Advanced Permalinks
WordPress claims to support advanced permalinks, but it is hardly advanced. I need to use a plugin called, well, Advanced Permalinks, to ensure that my designs are at dodesign.us/designs, and my blog posts are at dodesign.us/blog
Automatic or 1-Click Backups and Simple Restore
I wrote a tutorial that explains how to schedule automatic WordPress backups. Sure it works, but it takes time to set up. It would be very nice if this was a default feature.
Trust my HTML
WordPress has the tendancy to change my HTML, making even the most simple tasks almost impossible. Why does it do this? Who knows. All I know is that it can be really annoying. Here is a temporary fix.
Install Themes from Admin Panel
WordPress 2.7 allows us to install plugins from the admin panel. It is a great feature! Why not do the same with themes? It makes a lot of sense, right?
Download Manager
Sure, WordPress has a “Media Library,” but it doesn’t have a download manager. For someone like me that hosts files (in my case, designs), a built in download manager would be incredible. For now, I use a plugin called WordPress Download Monitor that does everything I need.
Related Posts
Listing related posts is very helpful to keep visitors on your site. Some plugins such as “Yet Another Related Posts Plugin” do this, but it definitely should be built in.
