What Should 2011 Hold for WordPress?

I have an entire huge list of things I want to cover during the meetup, but in the spirit of keeping posts short, I’ll just list a few things that we didn’t accomplish/finish in 2010 that I’d like us to prioritize for 2011:

• Make media features better
• Settings UI improvements
• UI cleanup
• Core plugins
• Standardize how plugins deal with settings and navigation
• New contributor mentorship program
• Documentation/handbooks/training materials
• Make www.ads-software.com/WordCamp.org better re organizing local groups

Code cleanup where things have been achieved in roundabout ways to support PHP4? There must be cruft that can be purged out of the code base from the next release.

Improving the Menu system. It’s great, but their is a lot of automation that can reduce building out the menus. For example, adding a parent page with children. Their should be an option to have the children to automatically fill out below the item.

It would be nice to have User Photo and Gravatar integrated. For example, the user could have a Gravatar, but also overwrite it with a User photo that’s uploaded locally on their blog. ACTUALLY, maybe a way to allow the user to register/upload their Gravatar through their local Dashboard? Whenever I explain gravatar.com they don’t see a purpose. Wouldn’t it be nice if they goto: Your Profile -> Gravatar, click Facebook Connect -or- Twitter OSAuth to register; then upload their Gravatar picture in their Dashboard? ??

• Make one-click updates work for more people. Interactive setup guide instead of just an error message.
• Drop PHP 4 compat.
• Simplify taxonomy table structure by merging term and term taxonomy tables.
• Improve the taxonomy API.
• Media: faster, simpler, obvious.
• Unit tests: they’re a mess. We need reliable ones, that run in some hosted environment so that every WordPress contributor can test their patches and see the result.
• Move Akismet and Hello Dolly out of the core package.

Better support for Local Meetups on www.ads-software.com/WordCamp.org is definitely something that I think is worthwhile and would serve the community as a whole. I am interested in hearing more about your ideas here and am willing to volunteer hours if you need me to do something to further this idea.

I agree with dropping PHP 4 and Hello Dolly, though Akismet could stay in core.

I think speed should be another thing to work on; SQL efficiency. Try to limit the number of database requests per page load. We shouldn’t need caching plugins to make our sites fast.

Maybe an option to turn off code formatting (automatic paragraphs and such)? There are plugins that do this, but I think it should be a core feature.

Maybe a “lite” version of WordPress; one that just does a blog with basic taxonomies. Basically posts, comments, categories, tags, media, and custom fields (and obviously plugins and themes). Sometimes I just want a lightweight blog engine.

• Built-in Pagination
• Built-in SEO options
• More user contact fields, like Facebook and Twitter, in profile options
• Better support for Local Meetups on www.ads-software.com/WordCamp.org
• Simplify taxonomy table structure by merging term and term taxonomy tables.

• UI cleanup

=> Drop IE 6 support
=> Use more CSS3 instead of background images

Fun! Thanks for asking us for our ideas, Jane & gang.

• Improve the Import/Export functions
• Brainstorm new ways to follow comments (ex: integrating Subscribe to Comments into core, push notifications, etc.)
• Focus on mobile application development (quality issues have taken away from WordPress brand)

Some I am +1ing from other people’s posts:

• Improve consistency of one-click updates (Mark Jaquith)
• Built-in SEO options (gugaalves)

More as I think of it.

Make gallery better and fix problems that mentioned already and not fixed till now.

• Better Media handling
• Gallery
• Documentation etc.
• Standard pagination
• BBpress integration, as a plugin or like the Network/MultiSites.

• Make PHP 5.2 the minimum required version.
• Decorate all kinds of objects–posts, terms, etc.–with similar methods and properties, so they can all be Looped over.
• Make the admin more easily themable.
• Reduce the admin’s dependency on third-party JS, when it’s used globally throughout the admin (as opposed to discrete components like TinyMCE)
• Establish a consistent API for front-end and admin Ajax interactions.
• Build a better API for plugins to extend the nav menus.
• Make the uploader more versatile and flexible.
• Offer an API for sending messages to users (error messages, upgrade nags, etc., more robust than the transient hack).
• User capability handling that doesn’t rely on serialized data.

• Better handling of widgets when switching themes
• Media improvements
• Support for child themes in the WP.org directory
• Front-page posting support for any theme

• Page speed optimization
• Better caching, minifying and options for CDN build in
• Mobile support build in
• Better search
• Newsletter system build it

Many thanks, keep up the good work!

Better support for international users:

• Centralized system for localization of plugins and themes
• Support for changes of hard coded English URL slugs (page, author, feed, etc)
• Support for non ASCII characters in usernames
• Localized versions of akismet.com (if it stays in core)