Make admin bar more useful

To me, the admin bar is more of a designer bar, because it focuses on activities related to building and styling the site, but not to administering it on an ongoing basis.

For example, the admin bar contains a link to themes, but not to plugins. On average, WordPress sites probably have 25 plugins and only 1 theme, and plugins are updated far more frequently than themes are.

Similarly, there are links to various ways of customizing the theme (menus, background, etc), but not to users or comments.

A radical idea would be to replicate the admin menu used “inside” WordPress to make everything accessible from the front end via the admin bar. This way, each site’s unique combination of tasks and each user’s unique role will determine what is available.

This approach has the advantage of making plugin-specific items available without any special code in the plugins.

Alternatively, the admin bar should be redone based on the most common administrative tasks performed across WordPress installations. I’m sure wordpress.com can provide those stats.