Version 3.0 Features

Picking your user name and password during the install process, #10396 would be a nice feature to add.

How To Do Project Development:
I think each version of WordPress could include more improvements if development was more organized. I would like it if the core team asked for feature requests and for feature developers before planning, then created all necessary tickets, assigned developers accordingly, and blessed the tickets. Then at feature freeze, any blessed tickets that have not made it to core due to lack of development get unblessed and all waiting tickets that are blessed get taken care of by committers within a day or two.

I think more developers would pitch in with smaller tasks if things were more organized and more concrete. It seams that key features, major bugs, and insignificant details dominate over medium and small features and improvements, leading the later to get pushed back for years. By letting everyone know where every ticket sits in a particular release features, improvements, and bugs can be put in parallel (separate tracks) and “line cutting” will stop being an issue. Which, getting back to the first sentence of this paragraph, will attract more developers.

The amount each developer contributes looks like the “long tail” if it were graphed. The core developers are given too much work and the outer circle of developers have to take their own initiative if they want to contribute anything. Hopefully the next release will have improved development.

It’d be nice if someone with authority went through tickets and requested features and selected some for development, then asked developers outside the inner ring to develop them. This would be a lot more inviting than a free-for-all in trac, because it’s hard to know where to start.

p.s. Thanks Jane for getting the development organized for 3.0.

like many others here, I always customize wordpress because I use it as my base CMS. So I’m interested in everything to do with custom post types. Things which I think would be useful are:
– media upload UI redesign and photo albums
– custom content type UI and API
– canonical plugins! and a UI for displaying them
– better help tab and better online documentation
– more template tags
– easy linking to internal content when writing new content
– separate cms distro with canonical CMS plugins installed by default
– better excerpt and thumbnail features
– custom default image sizes (for page headers and magazine style layouts)

I also think these features would make the WP experience better:
– built-in “Welcome to WordPress” guide for 1st time admin use
– front end comment moderation
– new default theme
– widget installer
– below post widgets
– better home template (easily allow page and posts together)
– default custom types (microblog, galleries, asides)

Add or change as many features as you want; if WP becomes slower and/or demands more cpu time and ram for it to run properly, then all the “glitter” amounts to a hill of beans.

v3.0 Suggestions:
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– Error log reporting service, also known as a “bug feedback service.” When you guys release an update or new code, it looks for errors caused by the introduction of the update or new code and reports results back to you.
– Submission of the mySQL slow queries log & Submission of the mySQL slow queries log parsed with mysqlsla. — So you guys know which queries are slow and need optimization.

Only a certain percentage of people report errors to you; imagine all the information you’d have if “wordpress log reports” were sent to some information parsing site on a daily basis? You’d have semi-instant feedback on your changes to the code without user intervention.

This would help everyone, I believe.

The two main features I’d like to see is:

1) Canonical Plugins
2) A much more robust Custom Fields system

Canonical Plugins for me makes it to number one since I imagine it will allow for a lot more functionality that we can rely upon from upgrade to upgrade. It is extremely frustrating to have a new upgrade with old plugins that aren’t yet upgraded. Particularly when we are building sites for clients.

In terms of Custom Fields – what I want is the ability to assign different field types for different types of content so that my clients can easily add the appropriate content without having to worry about messing up the code.

Along with this I would like to see as easy a possible a system for including those custom fields into our html/css/javascript code. Perhaps some sort of shortcode integration with html which is built into the backend.

Keep up the good work.

All the best,

Moshe

This is probably beyond obvious, but the developers should definitely take a look at the Most Popular Ideas and in particular to the Trust me when I edit HTML idea. A lot of people are asking for a better HTML editor!

Personally I would like WordPress to move more in the direction of a general CMS. The creation of custom pages with or without dynamic content should become easier and better manageable with WordPress.

The current image uploading process is painful. I’d like to see something like the Faster Image Insert plugin built into the core.

Also, the ability to use Slimbox or Lightbox without having to resort to a plugin. (or manually adding the code!)

I am super excited about merging MU!

I really love the speed at which useful relatively bug free features are added to WP. For 3.0 my preference would be a focus on the WPMU merge. I look forward to the possibilities it might bring and would encourage you to look at the additional domains issue others have mentioned.

But if the dev team are looking for core blog features my vote is for, easier internal linking to posts and pages from the post editor (and page editor too I guess). As this would greatly encourage internal linking (which is good practice for user interaction and SEO). I would suggest also adding an option to ignore *internal* pingbacks.

This is one feature I think would make blogging easier and quicker. I think WP dev should not forget this even if we move to more CMS type functionalty.