Yesterday morning I had pretty much nothing but glowing things to say about the new version of WordPress (3.2) that was released on the fourth of July. I am still very happy the upgrade and expect to be very pleased with it as I upgrade the rest of my blogs over the next few weeks and hopefully get a chance to play with the 2011 theme. However, I do have a few things that I would really like to see addressed with some near release coming out from WordPress. I am not sure I really expect to see any of them in a future release, but I think I will see if I can submit these ideas to the WordPress folks for the future. Give me your thoughts on them as well, so I can get a feeling if I am on the right track or not with these ideas.
- I really like to see a better notification system regarding when plugins change direction or name. The most recent one that brings this to my mind is the Jetpack plugin versus the more standard WP Stats. Now I have been using WP Stats for as long as I have been using WordPress and aside from sometime way back (before there was as recovery) my stats for this blog got confused and mixed up with a test site I was using and I ended up loosing them. That aside though, I have no problem with WP Stats. I read somewhere when going through things today that Jetpack now includes a WP Stats like tool and that is where the development is aimed. No one told me though and I had to find it on my own. WP Stats indicates they have plans still going forward to do some new and bigger things, but if they are switching to JetPack, please implement some kind of deprecation demarcation or something. I suggest this as I had another plugin I was using for a long time whose function had been replaced/obsoleted and it was not until months I realized that on my own.
- Keeping the theme of JetPack, I wish the consolidation of multiple tools into one plugin would stop. I will use the terms super plugins to describe them but it is aggravating. The idea of a plugin is to have a single function that I add to my blog. JetPack has about four other things built-in aside from the stats. Three of them duplicate another plugin (or even computer/browser function in the case of After the Deadline) and the other one I am just not interested in having at all. The extra overhead and potential drag on the system is just something I do not want to deal with. I realize that this is not something WordPress is really going to address, but the users could speak with download/lack of download votes.
- I really like the stats that I get out the WP Stats plugin and I appreciate that it runs on some servers that the WordPress folks are running. I understand for that to work that I need to have an API key and all that. However, the interface being shoe horned into the WordPress.com interface to get the API and do any of the limited configuration is really overdue for being dropped. There is no reason the interface for the API can not be incorporated fully into the plugin at this point. Further, the lack of time synchronization is really lame. I get that everywhere else from my GMT time, but the stats count is always three and four hours off in regards to day ends to my time here in the EST zone.
There are my big complaints and things I would like to see updated/fixed. Thoughts?
It’s not a upgrade to WordPress as such, but I’d really like the search tool for plug-ins to be cleaned up. It’s easier to jump out of WP and use Google to find plug-ins.
I often find that to be the case as well Bill. The search engine is under whelming and the tags used are often questionable for some of the plugins.