braindrain

WordPress MU merging with WordPress doesn’t really offer me anything. So, while that would be a good thing for many, there needs to be something in the mix for “the rest of us” who primarily use WP as a convenient way to quickly set up/maintain a “traditional” website.

I think that canonical plugins should be a major part of the 3.0 release. This actually ties in well with merging WP-MU. Anything that is not essential to core functionality should be spun off into a separate plug-in. Go ahead and distribute them with WP3.0 (and possibly default to activated) so no one screams “what happened?!” when stuff stops working because it is no longer part of the feature set. This would allow some of these features to be maintained and updated regularly in-between releases.

The only downside to canonical plugins is that if something in the core changes that breaks these plugins, what happens? Either insert backwards-compatible code until the plugin is updated or support the plug-ins to *get* them updated whenever a change happens.

Some of the things I would like to see spun off…

• User administration. I only use the admin account on most of my sites, so I generally have no need for visitors being able to create accounts.
• Graphical editor. I use the graphical editor, but I know many who don’t for whom it creates tremendous overhead
• Image/Media handling. Same as above.
• Comments. I often don’t allow comments on my blogs, since I’m trying to use them as traditional websites.
• RSS feeds.