Well, the inexorable drive toward the future continues with this post on the WordPress development blog about prioritising features for 2.8, and the associated survey. So I though I would take this opportunity to tell you what I think 2.8 should bring.

Widget Management

One of the options in the survey is widget management. I rated this as most important out of the available options. But it isn’t just the UI that needs attention, although it does, as my post on widget management concepts shows. If you have ever tried to do anything slightly advanced with widgets (see my widget structures plugin) then the code requirde can drive you mad.

Right now it is far too difficult to code widgets. Single widgets are easy enough, although not easy for those without coding knowledge (that is why I created the Fun with theme widgets plugin), but multiple use widgets are horrible and require a huge amount of code that you need to copy almost verbatim. It isn’t so much a feature of WordPress as a hack the developers figured out and then provided as an example.

I think that all this stuff needs to be added to the core so that a multiple use widget requires setting a single variable in the add widget function. Alternatively, or perhaps better yet, provide a widget class that you extend to make the new widget.

Finally, I think they need to consider whether widgets can be produced using something other than code. Perhaps XML that can be imported. I write about this back at the start of November – Does WordPress need a better type of widget?

Modularisation

This is the second major thing that I think WordPress needs to start doing, and I think should start doing in 2.8.

There are significant parts of WordPress that can be segregated out and put into core plugins. While these things do no harm if they are in the core and are not used it also means that you are limited to hooking into them, or rewriting them completely if you want to change them. I would like to see a system where you could copy the core plugin into user plugins, modify it, and then it would be a simple matter to make serious changes without modifying the core itself. Widgets would be a prime candidate for pluginisation as would links.

This may mean that the plugin system needs to be looked at to get the maximum performance out of it. But that is fine by me.

This is a very big project and that dovetails nicely with my feeling that they should really let 2.7 rest for a bit before replacing it. It is by far the most advanced (in terms of what users can do) system out there and I don’t think there is an immediate need to tinker with it beyond making major improvements.

Sum

WordPress has everything it needs right now. Having revamped the UI I think there is a need to step back and do the same for the underlying architecture and code. Considering where WordPress will go in the future. Should content management be the key, or better interaction with other blogs. And how about looking at which of the BuddyPress features should be plugins for WordPress as a whole.

The real things that are needed next are a focus on developers. This means modularisation, flexibility, and simplicity.

What do you think?