Jeff has a written a post over at performancing about his trip back in time to WordPress 0.71. It isn’t something I would have tried but I am really interested to see the old version of WordPress.
It really does bring to mind again the question of what features are really needed in WordPress so I decided to list out the features that actually I don’t think I would use now, even if I might once have used them.
In doing this I was quite surprised to find that there are only two features that I could happily live without: Links / Blogroll and Widgets.
Links seems to be a particularly outmoded concept to me. I’m not sure I have ever used this. I know there are people that do, but I wonder how much of this functionality is replicated in a widget. Do you you this?
For me, I find Widgets actually get in the way. There are a lot of people that are not comfortable with editing the sidebar manually and for them widgets are a good idea, but if you are, or can become comfortable with it you will find that the widget system actually just gets in the way. I know a lot of people use plugins to add widgets that let them insert PHP code that could just as easily be added to the theme or sidebar.
Of course there are lots of little things that I don’t use, but these seem to be the only major things, which begs the question: why does WordPress feel like there are loads of unused features in it when there really aren’t?
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Dito, this would really be the solution. WP 2.6 and Dreamhost for example at the moment…really hard when it comes to performance.
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Occasionally I go back to WP 1.5 to check out the backwards compatibility of something, and I’m always amazed at how much faster the admin for 1.5 is.
I sometimes think that WP would be better as a stripped-down core package, with much of the popular stuff—TinyMCE, Widgets, Auto-upgrade, etc.—as bundled plugins. There would be a number of benefits for speed, security, and flexibility.
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Ah yes, Good point Jeff. I never even knew it was there and I don’t see the point.
I said as much in the survey.
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Perhaps part of the problem is that, there are so many people using WordPress in this day in age that the things you don’t used are being used by some other group of individuals giving those features at least a little bit of worth. But, I think a good example of what you are talking about is the search in the admin panel. Who uses that thing lol.