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WordPress has about 2 major release per year if not more, this makes it outdated easier especially when it comes to API and hence the documentation of it in codex may not be up to date.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
[…] third of four instalments of the “Why WordPress” series (parts one and two) asks the same groups of twenty one what problems they see facing the WordPress community at the […]
Gotta add my voice to the “remove bloat”.
In ripping apart the code, there is so much waste. How many timing functions do we really need loading with every page load?
Does the “is_blog_installed” really need to be anything but a file/db check?
The functions.php file is now over 100k in size all by itself, and there are pages of includes required for every page load.
Yah, if I could get one thing it would be remove bloat.
Very nice and useful page, but this article is not correct displayed.
(blocks in cursive)
I agree that WordPress core is becoming bloated. I hate TinyMCE, if at least we could choose another WYSIWYG like FCKEditor! There should be an EASY way of taking all this junk away, together with wpautop and all those filters, and just say to WordPress: “TAKE THIS EXACT XHTML I’M GIVING YOU AND THROW IT IN THE_CONTENT(), THAT’S IT!” These image editors that are coming, they should really go for a plugin. WordPress is becoming fat, they deeply must note what modularization is and fix it before it’s too late. They already seem to know that, they are talking about canonical plugins and stuff, let’s hope they take the right decision. But what WordPress most needs is a MENU DESIGNER. Something like Drupal one. It should be easy to create as many menus as we wanted, add to them any post-page-category-tag-rss and everything else, and have these menus printed anywhere we wanted, with automatic generated classes with the same quality of body_class/post_class/comment_class. WordPress will never be a CMS while it relies page and category lists. And and of course, a better permalink structure. Current code should be ported to plugin and add some nice API feature to let us extend… Read more »
[…] You Can Change Anything In WordPress. What? and What Problems Face The WordPress Community? (It Answers) – More in the Q and A series I participated in. […]
WordPress should improve their community website than just a blog.
Allow a non-admin to edit the content of a sidebar widget. Better, designate user permissions for each active widget.
I agree. WordPress needs to be stripped down to the bare essentials, with everything else be installable packages. Even if a set of “canonical plugins” (for example, plugins that comprise the current feature set of WP) are installed on the server, make it possible for users to opt-out (for example, leave the GUI for editing off or the image handling system or revision or autosaving, etc.). Reduce the “core” to the minimum essential components needed for WP to run. This would make it faster and reduce the number of core updates that are necessary. Updates can be handled through standalone plugins. It also would make it easier to write documentation, as each plugin could be documented independently.
1) Enable the theme editor to work on files located in subdirectories: wp-content/themes/themename/subdir/*
2) Better management of search engine spiders so that mysql isn’t hammered on large sites with tens of thousands of pages.
3) Get more than a query count to help with optimization. It would be nice to have an option that would list ALL queries executed when a page is displayed.
4) Tips documenting how to optimize hosting hundreds of domains on a server to prevent bringing the server to its knees.
[…] You Can Change Anything In WordPress. What? | WPShout.com "Hypothetically, you have the power to change one thing in WordPress. What would that be?" A great question that Alex Denning asked to 21 famous WordPress developers. And you, what would you change? (tags: wordpress) […]
Simple: It needs a complete rewrite.
And while doing that:
– Go full-out OOP.
– Abolish crufty linear thinking (like “the loop”) in favour of better MVC/MVT structures.
– Start with a shared caching strategy that can use multiple backends (database, file, memcached, etc)
And bonus marks if you can do it in a real language like Python.
Oh, I think I just described Django with a nice UI.
One thing, beside the suggestions above.
By making it multi-language, WP will turn itself into the mighty king.
I would have loved to get rid of the bloat as well. Strip the addon features. Majority of WordPress blogs are one-man blog. Why not make the ability for multi-author blog as a plugin instead. Including all the functions whose codes add to the bloat.
I mean, why not just build a “WordPress Core”, and then the optional existing functions are fully supported by Automattic as plugin.
It all revolves around reworking the admin for the clients because it’s still too unusual and busy for my clients. Make the admin more client-friendly for clients who only need to do like two tasks in it. Let me set things up where I can hide features for their login.
I couldn’t agree more. While it’s rather easy to style the frontend however you wish, the backend stays a problem that at the moment can only be adressed by plugins. And we all know, how often plugins are updated too late or completely abandoned, turning every update of the core into a risky game.
Another point nagging me is the contineous changes of the backend: with nearly every update i have to check if my clients still get the processes necessary for their core uses and if my support docs are still up to date.
Therefore, if WP wants to play a role as a professional tool, we need another configuration layer for the backend, so different designs (tools, navigation and layouts) can be assigned to certain users or roles.
If these problems persist much longer, i’ll definitely drop WP as a CMS for my clients.
I like the diversity. Half the people mention taking the media stuff out, and the other half want it to be more powerful. 😛
Thomas Scholz mentions the use of guillemets as arrows. I agree that this is a bad use of the characters, however, I have no idea what they’d be replaced with. “|” just doesn’t fit for some uses.
[…] this by RSS? You’re missing out.. Part 2 is now online. subscribe by RSS to catch the […]
I’d really like the post editor to handle html In a Way that didn’t Force me to install tinyMCE