Wordpress 2.4: What I Hope to See

Dec 31 at 3:03pm by Andrew Benton

So, its been announced that Wordpress 2.4 will be released on January 24th. While it seems that they just released 2.3, and even more recently released a critical security update, here are some things I’m really, really hoping for in Wordpress 2.4.

Better WYSIWYG editor

If I had one pet peeve with Wordpress, it’s the almost unusable editor that comes with it. While it’s nice to view and edit the code, Wordpress doesn’t trust that you know how to write HTML and CSS, dear god this is annoying. Oh, and I’m not alone. Why do they insist on changing my div tags to p tags? Why can’t they just trust, or better yet, put an option in the control panel to let me turn this on or off?

Plugin Automation

So, you say you don’t trust us to edit the code in our posts, but lets go over the steps you want a user to go through to implement a plugin. Get ftp, login, browse to wp-content/plug ins, upload the folder contained inside a zip file, maybe even chmod some stuff. While this isnt really hard, it’s definitely maybe a barrier for users who either aren’t comfortable using FTP, or just naive to how to do so. How about building on the OneClick plugin, and integrating an available plugins area into the admin panel? That way you cut out.. oh ALL the steps to installing new plugins.

Better Image Handling

So, another big pet peeve is no built in editing. While there are some great 3rd party plugins for this, it would be great to be able to upload a picture, specify the thumbnail size, and do it that way. Even better would be some kind of crop tool built-in, that would save bloggers a lot of time in posting images to articles.

Other

Here are some things that I would just love Wordpress to have, not required, but could help me build my site better.

Built in community features (profiles, messaging, etc)
Integrate with OpenID or Facebook, Digg, something so they can login with their identity and post)
Advanced Image Gallery
Built-In Code formatting for posts

So, that’s about all I can think of right now. January 24th is fast approaching, and I really hope I see a few of these, I have projects in mind that just cannot be done with Wordpress.

What do you guys think? Am I asking too much?

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7 Responses for "Wordpress 2.4: What I Hope to See"

ShadowKnight

January 2nd, 2008 at 7:28 pm
1

Nice ideas and I hope to see them included aswell. Especially the plugins stuff, adding plugins can be a real pain at times.
WordPress Wednesday News: Mandatory WordPress Security Release, Sneak Previews of WordPress 2.4, Hoodies, Vote for WordPress, Moving to WordPress, Custom Fields, and More : The Blog Herald

January 2nd, 2008 at 11:21 pm
2

[…] Do You Want to See in WordPress 2.4? Andrew Benton has published a list of what he hopes to see in WordPress 2.4 (due the end of January) including improvements in the WYSIWYG Rich Text Editor, […]
Ivo

January 3rd, 2008 at 6:14 am
3

I wish to see native support for multilingual blogs as mine. I use a good plug-in for that but then feeds are a bit messed up.
DiggItLive

January 3rd, 2008 at 8:01 am
4

I installed the wordpress 2.4 nightly build for testing and i am allowing people to test it too from my website. :D
See this post for all info:
http://diggitlive.com/2008/01/03/wordpress-24-has-different-administration-panel/
Andrew Benton

January 3rd, 2008 at 8:10 am
5

DiggItLive, that is a very cool post, thanks. I replied on your blog, but the design is new, but that’s about all I can tell though.
Matt Ellsworth

January 4th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
6

I agree with you about an integration with some other service - would be great. I would love to not have to update my template files this time around… that would be useful.
Brian Purkiss

January 10th, 2008 at 12:44 am
7

Hm… Ok, here’s my views.

Better WYSIWYG editor
Eh… The current one does suck… But in my opinion all WYSIWYG editors suck.
But I hardcode all my web sites and hate not being able to fully customize my stuff. But that’s because I know how to do that, most don’t.
:-/

Plugin Automation
Eh…
That would be kinda nice I guess…
:-/
Again, I like being able to customize all my stuff. Besides, I bought an FTP uploader, so I need to use it right? ;-)

Better Image Handling
Hm… I disagree here.
I want my blogging platform to focus on blogging. If I want to do something with images, I’ll use that - they’ll do a better job than a web app anyways.
But again, I have Photoshop.
Even so, (like you said) there are many simple free shareware/freeware apps out there that do that.

Built in community features (profiles, messaging, etc)
What you’re asking for is almost completely different than blogging - almost.
Although, check out the Community Version of Movable Type. I actually considered that for a while…
(but note that the installation isn’t as easy as Wordpress)

Integrate with OpenID or Facebook, Digg, something so they can login with their identity and post)
Uh… no.
Sorry, but no.
There already is that feature - entering your URL in the URL section of the comment form. I’m logged into Facebook, Digg, and the others all at the same time and I don’t want my links to go to any of them - I want the links to go to my blog.
:-/

Advanced Image Gallery
Eh…
That would be nice, but again, I’d prefer that the people at Automattic focus on blogging, and not image stuff.
There is 3rd party stuff out there though.
:-)

Built-In Code formatting for posts
Again - I hard code everything, so I wouldn’t need that.

-

Nice thoughts!
Now all we can do is wait to see what comes!

Oh, btw, I found this through Entrecard.
:-)

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