WordPress Core: Feature Ideas for a Better Experience

Ever used a plugin, or had an idea, that you wish was a part of WordPress because it would make publishing/managing your content so much easier? Over the years, quite a few features have been integrated into the platform that started off as plugins, random ideas or as features of a theme.

Naturally, one cannot expect every whim and fancy from a user to make it into the core, as the platform has to cater to a wide set of users out of the box and remain light in size. In this case, less is more. But sometimes, a little bit more can’t hurt ;-)

Here’s a few plugins/user ideas that I think would make a good improvement to the overall usability of WordPress, without confusing new adopters or current users.

User Contact Info

It’s about time this screen was updated to include new social services like Twitter, Facebook etc…, which are being used as points of contact today.

Better yet, allow the user to add as many extra contact fields as they need, it would make this feature so much more useful. Justin Tadlock has a good write up about it, you can even use his code to add your own custom fields today.

Bonus: Provide users the option to show custom created fields by using shortcodes, so they can drop it in Posts/Pages and sidebars.

Post Formats Edit Screens

I like the Post Formats feature introduced in WordPress 3.1, at times I even prefer them over Custom Post Types. You can style your Formats in separate ways using CSS, and even call separate layout templates. But that’s all happening in the presentation backend, it would be nice to have some control while creating the content too.

Alex King made a contribution back in October of 2011 towards it, you can check his post on Post Formats Admin UI here and see what I’m talking about. I can’t think of any reason why this would be a bad addition to the WordPress core. Then again I’m biased towards it, so that could be why.

Image Insert Meta Box

I don’t like the popup image uploader, at all. Images should not be handled via a popup, you should not have to changes tabs to arrange them, or insert them again. That’s why I love the Faster Image Insert plugin and I’m going to install it on every site I run with WordPress (which is all of them).

The plugin allows you to insert your images exactly as the popup upload interface works, by letting you do so via a meta box in your Write/Edit screen. It has saved me quite some time so far, as the popup uploader does tend to lag at times.

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Do you have any plugins/ideas that you would like to see as part of the core? Leave a comment below, who knows a WordPress developer could see it and it might actually make it into the core if it’s good enough!

Image credit, dirtykoala.

Tags:

• blogging