What Should 2011 Hold for WordPress?

• Create the centralized system for l10n of plugins and themes. (@Milan Dini?)
• Make Plugin and Theme Directory interface available in different languages.
• Update the stylesheet of localized sites to 3.0 style.
• Make localized versions stats available again.

Improve the search in Forums to enable filtering by date, resolved/not resolved, and other simple things. Today, for example, I searched for a topic and had to wade through unresolved entries from six years ago! It would also help to suggest standard terms for searches; often I don’t know what to search for.

Custom User Profile fields in the UI

My first thought in the last year or so has been better core/built-in support for content blocks. This in itself will make the WordPress even better than it is.

More focus on BuddyPress & bbPress

More than any other WP feature, I’d like to see BuddyPress and bbPress developed into a more mature state. To catch up with the WP core they should be receiving the lion’s share of attention right now.

Maybe not for 3.2, but as soon as bbPress (plugin) 1.0 and BuddyPress 1.3 is out the door, I’d like to see a WordPress release that is all about playing nice with bbP and BP.

Speed – Teach us!

Speeding up WordPress just like that can’t possibly be an easy thing to do. Rather, why not educate us, the users? Give us more comprehensive information on how to build and maintain an “optimized” and “speedy” WordPress site. Give us (or point us to) the tools to closely analyze our sites and track down sources of slow-downs.

Acknowledge contributions

Contributions should happen mostly because you always want to help improve the very project that your site/client relies on, but there’s nothing wrong with a little extra incentive now and then.

• Feature particularly helpful developers in blogposts, link to their portfolios, companies & services.
• For every release cycle do a pseudo-competition for “Contributing Companies” where you post a top3 of companies that pulled the most weight for that release.
• Create “honor badges” that developers can put on their sites to show that they’re committed to contributing back to the WordPress project.

Custom post types UI

Sure it’s advanced stuff, but from what I’ve experienced the advanced is easily separated from the simple when it comes to CPT. More Types is my favorite example of a CPT plugin that does a great job of opening up the simple stuff, while dodgy advanced options are less accessible. It also works seamlessly (last time I tried it) with all sorts of custom post types as opposed to some of these editors that won’t discover new or non-default types.

Also supported:
– Standardize how plugins deal with settings and navigation
– PHP 5.2 required
– Front-end editing/posting (i.e. make TinyMCE accessible in front end)
– Akismet out of core

A beautiful Twenty Eleven theme elegantly designed to accommodate publishers that want a blog, a tumblelog, or CMS-ish theme.

+1 for Better handling of widgets when switching themes; automatically moving widgets to the first available sidebar when sidebar ids don’t match as opposed to moving them to inactive. It might be neat for themes to also register a “primary” sidebar when the first available sidebar might not be the best spot.

Suggestion for all future ‘default’ themes to have a full accessibility review before release.

Sorry for my English:

• Ability to tag and categorize pages

: A lot of users and networks are not using posts (or very few) but would like to add keywords to their pages and categorize them. That is such a fundamental thing that it’s difficult to rely on plug-ins. This should be included into the core. There are many requests for that in the forums and it’s a very frustrating limitation of WordPress.

• Get rid of the attach/detach system of pictures : The simplicity of the WP gallery is great but it should not be required to attach a picture to a post/page before including it into a gallery. I’ve never seen that before. This is just insane. Howerver i totally disagree with people that want very advanced plugins like NextGen Gallery to be included into the core. Ok, this is cool, but the core should be kept simple and basic.

Sorry if theses suggestions had already been made.

Thank you so much and keep the good work!

• Media!
• Links as CPT
• continue itterating on custom header / background to make it more child theme friendly
• Front end poster (ala p2)
• The ability to #blamenacin from the admin
• Themes should register default widgets that populate a sidebar (assuming that it’s empty), so that first time users aren’t confused as to why adding one widgets removes the entire sidebar contents
• Move away from KSES and towards a library that is actually maintained

1. Better Pagination of Post List pages. (i.e. what WP-PageNavi does)
2. Clean up template tags, we have so many that do very similar things, and standardize parameters.
3. Cleanup of Backwards compatibility code. Perhaps if we are uping the requirement to PHP5 that we remove funtions depreciated pre say 2.5 or 2.7

One thing I haven’t read here but think would be really, really useful in the long run –

full integration of the BP x-profile BACKEND functionality in the WP core. I’ve been playing with Buddypress and WordPress member setups and it’s always annoyed me that there are two different locations in which member data is stored (particularly given the lack of information about how they are working / interact). Make that one extensible location, let BP use the WP member data instead of the other way around, as “syncronizing” currently requires.

As I see it, member data is core WP functionality.

Also

+1 KILL THE THICKBOX, use something faster, please
+1 on media handling, thumbnail cropping and regeneration from the backend
+1 fine if this is added by core plugins, but if so, users should have the opportunity to choose their included core plugins like on the jQuery site
+1 on conditional menus
+1 on post/page expiration
+1 on is_child (still…)
+1 on sql joins (wp_query doesn’t allow to use eg meta filters on more than one post type) – already in trac
+1 better general options panel
+1 make press this even better adding more one-click-posting functionality
+1 Core option to post to facebook/Twitter (I’m continously finding myself in the situation where I’m posting stuff on fb instead of my blog)
+1 work with facebook (who else…) on an option that allows external comments to be synchronized with fb comments via iframe, just like they propose with their comment box. It’s a good idea, but it needs to be the other way around, users on fb should have to agree to their comments being stored on the blog site. Their “the web is facebook” approach should make them receptive to this, in my opinion.

I LOVE WordPress. Amidst my glowing affection, my biggest gripes are:

* Kill the sidebar, long live the widget. Widgets should be completely rehashed so that I can place them contextually. Like, place a widget for a category, a post, a group of posts, etc. Many of my clients ask for multiple sidebars in multiple contexts and we end up with a zoo of sidebars. On that note, widgets sometimes need to know how wide the sidebar is. For example, an image widget ought to know how wide the sidebar is. Right now there is no way for the widget to really know about it’s visual context.
* Authentication code cleanup: I often want to make pretty frontend sign up systems or integrate with other SSO systems and am constantly getting stuck by the fact that there are inadequate hooks in the auth code. In general the auth code is hostile towards extension.
* Menu system is awesome, but not expendable. I want to be easily able to tell the menu system that it should index custom groups of data / custom posts, etc..

Oh, and i’m down with WordPress absorbing my image widget.

https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/image-widget/

My suggestions:

• Tag search via URL: https://domain.tld/tag/tag1+tag2/ should give out all articles tagged with tag1 AND tag2
• A better paging navigation: [1] [2] [3]
• XML Sitemap
• Correct replacment of foreign characters in permalinks (? –> ae, ? –> ss), see this plugin
• Typographical Improvements: Converting the inch sign into real quotation marks. There was once a nice plugin but unfortunatelly development discontinued
• Live Comment Preview
• No preinstalled plugins
• automatic thumbnail creation with given thumbnail size
• Better SEO options for post titles: Article heading – Blog name
• faster page loading
• Shorter URLs: https://domain.tld/article-name/ instead of https://domain.tld/YYYY-MM-DD-article-name/

+++ for progressive enhancement HTML5/CSS3 and optimization/streamlining
+++ for better mobile versions of the admin interface

– Archive/wp_get_archives parameter for custom post types.
– Breadcrumb template tag that uses page hierarchy OR nav menu hierarchy
– Further development of the Nav Menu system

Hurray!