Have you given much thought to WordPress 2.8? Well, the WordPress development team is and they need your help and input.
With WordPress 2.7 released, work is ongoing for WordPress 2.8 and WordPress wants your feedback. In “Prioritizing Features for WordPress 2.8,” Jane Wells invites people to take a poll on what are the top priorities WordPress developers should be putting their energy into.
Currently, they are focused on WordPress Widget management, automatic Theme updates and installs, and performance improvements. The poll features the most popular features requests from the Ideas forum and more that the WordPress developers want to work on. Vote by noon on December 31 to have your say in what you want to see in WordPress 2.8.
For more WordPress News, see the latest edition of my Blog Herald WordPress News: WordPress News: WordPress 2.7 Awesome, WordPress.com 5 Million, Plugins Updated, and WordCamp News.
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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.
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47 Comments
It would be nice to be able to find all your plugins like in 2.6. don’t know why you changed it up so. The 2.7 version makes it harder to find and activate things than before. The plugins should be all in one place instead of some in “plugins” and some in “tools”. The 2.7 is just too confusing.
@Wayne: Interesting you find WordPress 2.7 confusing. I had almost no learning curve, as did many. A lot of work went into researching how people used WordPress and functionality to create WordPress 2.7. There are a few buggy things, but for the most part, it’s much more efficient to navigate, according to most.
As for Plugins, this is a long time problem. Plugins “should” be under Plugins, but some Plugins require connection with core features, such as Akismet. How would you like to go to Plugins, then Akismet, then another panel to manage your comment spam. Having Akismet’s panel connected with the Comments Panel makes sense. However, management panels “should” be on the Plugins panel. WordPress Plugins are the responsibility of their developers, not WordPress, so they have the freedom to put them where they want. WordPress offers guidelines not rules on this. You don’t like where a Plugin author has put their panel, whine to them to change it. 😀
ALOT FASTER. right now its really slow.
I would like it to be more streamlined and faster. Right now it takes to long to load, and sometimes freezes. More AJAX
WordPress 2.7 is much faster than previous versions, though it does load a LOT more JavaScripts than ever before to handle the new interface. Users using your blog will experience a faster response. You, administrating your blog, will experience faster performance in that you have to wait through less page loads due to improvements in the interface, and if you are taking advantage of Google Gears which handles caching with WordPress 2.7, this process will speed up. As computers and browsers improve, expect performance to also improve, but they’ve done amazing improvements in speed.
To integrate Google Gears into your WordPress experience, click “Turbo” on your Administration Panels.
I think it’s time for WordPress to start optimizing existing functions and performance rather than introducing new features. In terms of functionality 2.7 seems to be as close to perfection as you can get.
So I suggest 2.8 to be a faster & more optimized 2.7.
@Prospero: I do hope you are participating in the survey and letting WordPress know what you think is most important to you as a user.
Hi! The current “gallery” function in a page or post is great, but it would be nice if one could tick off any image in the media library and create a gallery on any page/post.
Apart from that…you gals/guys rule!
Ok I have a nice addition if it can be done…?
What about the ability to use the php code from an RSS reader directly in a post / page. It already works in the sidebar but for some unknown reason it will only work on the main pages or posts if Java script is used instead of php. This was a very popular addition to the SMF Forum boards & I’m sure it would be equally popular on WordPress. Oh one other thought, what about being able to place a block (like in the sidebar), anywhere on the post page, much like placing a picture in a post / page. As for WordPress 2.7 😦 I’m afraid I have to go with many of the other comments, the flash uploader is a total waste of time as it never works, the verticle layout is much harder to work with than the horizontal layout in 2.6 & for some reason when accessing the admin panel it hangs for around 30 seconds every single time. Other than that it’s great when you can eventually get used to working with it !
Keep up the good work
Steve…
What you are describing is done with WordPress Plugins. There are quite a few that will pull feed content into blog posts, or into the sidebar. Many forum/blog integrations use these.
You know there are WordPress Administration Plugins that will change the look of WordPress 2.7? And have you tried turning on Google Gears? It really does speed things up.
Be sure and let the WordPress development team know what you like and don’t like so they can put that into the pot for WordPress 2.8.
I would love for the WP developers to make it easier to maintain multiple WP installs – it’s very difficult with the current release schedule, new features and frequent breaking of backward compatibity. I’d suggest creating a “stable” branch and a “development” branch like many other open source projects and use dev for new features, stable for bug fixes only.
How about a a function that could pull the archive articles from the Database from XML based “static” database based on the category or tag name to reduce database times.
For example on December 1st all of Novembers articles would be added to a static xml file which would pull the data into the archive template, verses pulling from the database. The files are on the database but for archival or backup purpose only and the site uses the static XML file to pul to the live site. I know there is probably a CACHE plugin that may do this somewhere but it wold take WP to the next level and houldn’t be too difficult. Time to get away from the separate plugins and get stuff built in.
I want it not bind with URL since I might change my domain name from time to time. I suffered a lot.
@honnix: What do you mean by “suffer”? There was a drop in your PageRank? It’s a pain to use the MySQL database to quickly search and replace your domain name? I’ve changed domain names, which is not recommended to do very often in general as it does impact your stats a bit, and it isn’t very painful. So I’m curious what you mean by suffer.
i want generate real HTML pages.
@Alex: What do you mean by “real” HTML pages? All pages generated by WordPress have HTML in them, thus are HTML pages, though they are generated using PHP and JavaScript. The pseudo-static Pages of WordPress are often considered “static” pages, and a non-dynamic web page (static HTML if you will) is easily integrated into WordPress. So I don’t understand what you are looking for. Static HTML pages, in the traditional sense, were a pain to maintain and produce. I’m SO glad to never see one again and hate it when I have to face one.
The 2.7 wp release is kind of interesting but… the category base glitches are still not corrected from the SEO point of view.
There’s a plethora of templates, plugins and widgets that I appreciate but you guys need to fix the category base issue. I’m not the first to complain about it and I won’t be the last.
cheerz
And I’m sure you’ve complained directly to the WordPress Developers on the Forums and in the Ideas pages? A lot of our ideas of SEO are now dead. They are limited to Google and not other search engines, and often based upon assumptions not reality. Google is moving more and more into TrustRank and profiling, leaving behind old contextual notions of SEO, so maybe the category issue isn’t as important as it once was. Either way, let your opinion be heard directly to the people who are listening.
My biggest gripe with 2.7 (and only, by the way) is the fact that my plugins are located all over the place as someone else had mentioned. I’ve got plugins under Appearance, Plugins, Tools, Settings, etc. I just wish that they were all under one section which would be much, much, much easier to manage. Or possibly a drop-down menu on the main dashboard that allows you to pick and choose a plugin to manage right there? That’d be nice.
Otherwise I’ve not experienced the slow performance of 2.7 that other people are mentioning. It’s pretty fast for me, faster than any other WP version I’ve used, and I love it thus far.
To have an option to change fonts for each post! Xanga, Blogger, HOmestead, all have this option. Why can’t WordPress?
I don’t know. It depends upon what you are trying to do. If you want a different font for every page on your blog, I’d not be a fan. You can manually change fonts, which is really what the other blog services do (they just offer you a button) through the examples used in WordPress.com Blog Bling: Fun Font Bling. Few people play with fonts as they understand the seriousness of doing so. It isn’t pretty, makes your blog cluttered, and only a few fonts are “web friendly” which means your choices of all those funky fonts are usually not seen by anyone but you as the font must be installed on the computer visiting the site in order to be seen. See CSS Experiments – Web Fonts and Embedded Fonts at the bottom of the article for a living example of the various fonts available on the web and which ones appear on your browser.
Hey, how about a bug-fix and speed improvement for 2.7 before we even *start* talking about 2.8, OK? Everyone already knows 2.7 is horribly slow. A deal-breaker for me: The extra functions I used to be able to add to the HTML editor tool bars by modifying tiny_mce_config.php do NOT show up anymore in 2.7. Why don’t you have tinyMCE installed by default to use *all* of its available tools/options? Do you think we’re too stupid and will be overwhealmed by the extra buttons? C’mon…
And if you don’t want to give us back something like the old 2.6 dashboard with its BIG TABS so we can find stuff easily — not to mentioned having to drill down click after click to modify out SETTINGS now — how about at least using larger font sizes on the new dashboard? Or maybe give us access to the CSS for the dashboard so we can customize its look to suit our personal tastes and eyesight?
I could go on, but others have already outlined what needs to be done before WordPress moves on to 2.8 — still, if for some reason you don’t want to issue a fix-up for 2.7, then at least implement the above in 2.8 so we can get back to doing useful work with Word Press instead of having to fight with it.
— Frustrated in Florida (and self-downgraded back to 2.6.5 until there’s 2.7 bug fix).
A ready-to-go shoutbox, perhaps? I’d also love to see options to exclude/include posts from selected categories without having to modify the conditional tags.
@Adlina: Have you tried the WordPress Plugins for shoutboxes and chats? There are some interesting ones and you don’t even have to use the ones provided by WordPress Plugins. A lot of WordPress bloggers are using non-WordPress specific chats.
WordPress Plugins also offer exclude/include posts from selected categories, though I’m not sure what your usage would be to be more specific.
I would like to be able to show visitors a list of all authors/members that have postings on my site, which functions as an ‘open podium’ for artists.
kind regards,
Lilian
@Beli: This is also available and possible through WordPress Plugins and use of WordPress Template tags within a WordPress Theme. You can create an author page, or have each author byline link to the author’s page which would list information about the author as well as a list of their posts. You can list authors in your sidebar, and do a lot of things. See WordPress Plugins for Multiple Blogger Blogs for some ideas.
I would love to be able to handle large database queries without having to install a CMS or other type of front end, for example to be able to insert a Database into a section of the blog which could be sorted by different major topic headers like Store type, Product type, etc. It would also be nice to be able to specify which pages are displayed in the page area and which not to be displayed. A built in “Contact Us” form would also be a major addition. Speed is currently a factor as well, clean up some dirty code and place some it in the footer to minimize load times.
@Demosthenese: While a contact form built in makes sense as it impacts the majority of WordPress users, what you are seeking is currently available with PHP coding experience and WordPress Plugins.
Features which impact the few should be handled by WordPress Plugins. Changes to the core of WordPress should impact millions.
This might be a small request, perhaps filled by a plugin but I’ll still suggest it here anyways.
I’d like a way to reverse page numbering. So that my oldest posts show up on page 1. And that way they’ll always be on page 1. Not pushed backed to another page as new posts get added. I’ve seen Google link to these archive pages instead of the actual post for a search result but by that time the relevant post has been pushed off to another page.
Say someone is writing a ongoing story in chapters/posts and I’ve just heard about it. They’re at the 345th entry but I want to start at page 1. Currently, page 1 would actually be page 34 (if counting 10 posts per page) and if I can’t finish it all at once and save a link to page 15, the content I’m looking for could be pushed to page 16 or more before I return and my link wouldn’t work the way I’d expect/want.
In addition to that, how about the ability for posts off the main page be listed oldest to newest? So the main page would list the same as it does now (’cause regular visitors would want to see the new stuff) but on the archive pages it’ll be more readable in a log book format with reading down the page.
The second part isn’t necessarily ideal for traditional blog content, but I think it could be useful for a few situations. More then once I’ve been going from page to page, scrolling down to the bottom and then working my way upwards.
Anyways, that’s just some little stuff that I think could make WordPress better. 🙂
Wayne
@Wayne: There are Plugins that will reverse the post order. Since WordPress is designed primarily to be a blog, and a blog runs on reverse chronology so the most recent post is at the top, very few people would appreciate having this flipped around, which is why some who wanted that created Plugins to do that.
I’ll totally concede that the post ordering is in the domain of plugins.
But the page numbering? I’m starting to think of it as a bug to be fixed. Search Engine results and bookmarks can’t be trusted because of it.
If for some reason I sent this link to a friend: https://lorelle.wordpress.com/page/10/ how long could I expect it to have what I was intending to send? What if that friend wanted to reference that link again in 6 months?
And on my tiny, insignificant, pointless, personal blog if Google links to http://wayne.mondochrome.ca/page/5 for a result on “Vent-Miser” well that’s not going to come up with anything ’cause the relevant post has been pushed to http://wayne.mondochrome.ca/page/6 two posts ago.
Maybe Google keeps up to date fairly quickly but maybe I *just* added two posts rendering the results inaccurate.
I’m willing to admit that I may be tilting at windmills here but that’s the danger you risk when you provide me with a soapbox. 🙂
@Wayne: That’s a different issue and comes under the realm of “duplicate content” among other things. 😀 Yes, this is a serious issue, but also one that has been around for a very long time. Even Google is questioning the indexing of archive pages from categories, tags, and so on. This issue is more than a WordPress issue, since it isn’t WordPress specific. It impacts of lot of blogs and the problem is in search engines indexing those pages and returning them in the search result. While some are thrilled with the SEO benefits of getting coverage on anything and everything, some are making multi-post pageviews like this blocked from indexing through the robots.txt.
It’s worth considering letting the WordPress development team know of your concerns. Maybe others feel the same way. That’s the ideal place to put your soapbox. 😀
The posibility in wp-admin to create in my computer a complete.sql file back-up of mysql, so i can sleep well.
@Minea Adrian: Backups were integrated into WordPress for a few versions, but a bug in the code and a lot of problems with the variety of server setups made the developers remove it. There are plenty of Plugins and the very easy to use built-in Export feature that allows you to backup your WordPress content any time you want or on a regular basis.
I would like to see the links to plugins and settings on the right hand top side. Just like the “New Post” button”
Ruben
I honestly can’t figure out this new dashboard. It is horribly confusing. many of the changes were a waste.
@Douglas: Can you be more specific with the features you like or don’t like or find confusing when you give your feedback to the WordPress team. Most are reporting the new interface is easier, faster, and better structured than ever before, and there are WordPress Plugins available which will sort of put it back to a way you might be more comfortable with. There are a lot of new Administration Panel interface changing Plugins starting to come out that work with this new design.
I have an idea, how about QUIT UPDATING!!! It’s getting ridiculous….. Update after update. Not fun updating this stuff every month….
Just a thought 🙂
User access management to posts or pages would be nice! Would be nice to be able to keep some stuff private
@Dennis: You can already make any post or Page private right on the Write Post/New Post panel. Did you want more than that? You can make your whole blog private, too.
something to help with coding for people that want to place banners and ads in specific places and dont know how
@reed: Like many of the other suggestions on this list, there are tons of WordPress Plugins that do this for you already. WordPress is not in the business of the business of blogging – they leave monetization up to you and your favorite WordPress Plugin authors. 😀
Functionality similar to the_excerpt_reloaded built in would be awesome.
Love the site, in my mind there are about 2-3 branded WordPress related portals that are up to date with everything WP, and this is one of them.
I personally think that WP should offer easy use of multiple sidebars. I was thinking that they were supposed to be integrating this already….so maybe I missed how to do this, or maybe it is that the feature itself isn’t obvious or as intuitive as it should be.
I would like to see the WYSIWYG to have the option to act more like a Dreamweaver, or another development tool, somehow doing code completion, or a contextual menu or buttons to insert reused snippets of code at a one button press…
What do you mean by WordPress “should offer” easy use of multiple sidebars. WordPress Theme designers are the ones to talk to when it comes to sidebars, though WordPress is working on making the use of sidebar widgets cross the sidebar barrier. WordPress doesn’t control sidebar availablity. WordPress Themes do.
Dreamweaver and other WYSIWYG tools are used, unfortunately, by many to create WordPress Themes. The design and development of site designs are not really the responsibilty of WordPress, but of the site owners, administrators, and designers. Many get confused about that.
I would like it to be faster. And, more flexible to remove or change the default category base from permalinks.
Are you using the “Turbo” feature which hooks into Google Gears, speeding up WordPress? As for changing the permalink structure to include categories, that’s one that I’ve argued over for a long time, but the problem lies outside of WordPress. See this discussion with Dougal Campbell and WordPress experts on why.
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