What Would You Change In WordPress?

The second of a four part series which kicked off last Thursday with Why WordPress? Just as last time, RSS readers are missing out! Today the question twenty one of the WordPress community – developers, designers and bloggers – is answering is the question:
You have the power.
Second question. Hypothetically, you have the power to change one thing in WordPress. What would that be?
As with last time, in no particular order, here are the responses:
Strip out all of the worthless features and let plugin developers continue to improve ideas and innovate new ones. There is no reason for crap like post revisioning and image editing to be included in the WordPress core. Stick with the essentials, eliminate the fluff, and focus on optimization, security and performance. Basically, if I had the power, I would stop the bloat and eliminate the push for upgrades just for the sake of upgrades. Well, okay so that’s like two things, but it’s all kind of related.
–Jeff Starr
WordPress has about 2 major release per year if not more, this makes it outdated easier especially when it comes to API and hence the documentation of it in codex may not be up to date. If I have the power, I will assign someone to have a official documentation rather than relying on the public to update it.
–Lester Chan
–Ian Stewart
-Brian Gardner
–Jean-Baptiste Jung
I’ve been thinking about this question for long. I even asked my Twitter followers about it but wasn’t convinced by the feedback.
A couple of years ago, I would indeed have had a few stuff to answer. Most likely, I would have debated a bit about open source vs open development. A couple of years ago, I had the feeling that, while code was coming from a number of folks, but the project was clearly led and ruled by Matt (or so it seemed at least from an outside point of view). Namely, the 2.5 redesign was something completely closed. Nowadays, the dev process seems to be much more open: polls about features or UI, regular dev meetings.
Honestly, today, if I had to change one thing about WordPress, I don’t know what it would be. Maybe I would just kill everything related to the visual editor because I just hate this stuff 🙂
–Ozh
–Indrek SaarnakUhm… I would probably make the image handling superiour, so that you could upload, crop, resize the image and have a built in dynamic resizer built-in. We use timthumb for that now, and it seems like all themes use this, so why not make it standard?
–Magnus Jepson
–Leland Fiegel
–Michael Martin
–Ashfame
I’m also a bit concerned the core is getting too “bloated” with code
–Ben Gillbanks
–Thomas Scholz
–Jeff Chandler
I’d add full support of custom post/content types. The foundation is there and there’s been a lot of work done toward this goal in WordPress 2.9. What I’d like to do is type a few lines of code and have a new write panel open up in the admin that fully supports its own taxonomies and allows you to easily do all the things you can now do with other post types. It should also be easy to create new permalink structures for these post types. That’s at the top of my wishlist, and I’m hoping this is available in WordPress 3.0.
–Justin Tadlock
–Alex King
From a themers point of view, one of the things I’d love to see changed is the ability to decide where do you want to show a widget, at least for pages, and have a suffix field for each widget, to enable have differently styled widgets in the same sidebar.
–Jason Schuller
–Alex Cragg
–Mehmet Ozekinci
Another great round of interviews; thanks again to all those who answered :). Once again, I open the question to the floor: if you could change one thing in WordPress, what would that be? Do leave a comment.