Fresh

In yesterday’s post I hit upon two major developments happening with WordPress this year: the merge of WordPress MU into WordPress, and better support for custom post types.  But there’s more! Here are just a few more advancements in the WordPress world that I’m looking forward to this year.

New 2010 default theme

Kubrick: klassic, but old and krusty. At eROI we’ve discussed creating our own default/starter themes that contain all the basic essential functions for a blog or a non-blog website. Many theme developers just getting started in WordPress (or even those who’ve been at it a while) take the default theme and tweak it to fit their structure/design.  Oftentimes this leads to having extraneous code that isn’t really needed or even code that has been deprecated. Having new default themes with up-to-date functions, heavily commented HTML and CSS, more basic HTML structures and without functions we don’t use often will help new members of our team learn theme creation faster.

But before we could get out of the gate with our eROI Starter Theme however, I learned that Automattic was already in discussions of creating a new default theme for 2010.  I think it would also be a great idea to have multiple default themes depending on the type of site you are building (blog, basic brochure site, community site, magazine site, etc. etc.), which others have suggested as well. Plus, there is also talk of updating the default theme every year, which is an excellent idea considering how regularly new features are added or changed, or functions deprecated.

For the immediately future though, it looks like we will be getting the new 2010 theme along with WordPress 3.0 in April. Check out the current demo and watch as it evolves!

Canonical plugins

If you’ve ever tried looking for a WordPress plugin you know that sometimes it can be quite a task to find a plugin that:

• Does what you need it to do
• Is compatible with the most recent version of WordPress
• Was written by someone willing to offer support, patches and/or new features
• Doesn’t make your site vulnerable to exploits or slow it down with unoptimized or unnecessary code

Even plugin authors with the best intentions at the beginning can give up on supporting it or updating their plugin, even if the functionality is highly sought after (may have something to do with the fact that compensation for WordPress plugin developers is usually no more than a pat on the back, if that). To help alleviate some plugin frustration, the core dev team has decided to start an initiative originally called “canonical plugins” (though I think they have decided to go with “core plugins” as the official name). These plugins would be developed by teams in conjunction with the development of WordPress itself, and have an official bug tracking system and release schedule.

The first core plugin, Health Check, will be a handy tool that will assist in troubleshooting your WordPress installation should things get a bit wonky. Hopefully that will just be the first of many, many, many official/canonical/core plugins.  With core plugins you know they in theory will have been written and tested properly, will always work with the latest version of WordPress, AND be optimized and secure. Sounds miraculous!

Menu management

This is a new feature in WordPress 3.0 that will fill a HUGE hole in its CMS capabilities. Previously it has been very difficult to create an easily manageable navigation/menu on your WordPress site.  Creating a dynamic list of navigation links on the front-end is doable, but difficult or nearly impossible if you want to have navigation containing mixed content, e.g. pages with different parents, posts, category pages, etc.  For example, if you wanted your sidebar navigation to contain your About page, your introduction blog post, and links to your categories “Design” and “Development”, you’d probably have to code those links into your template.

With a menu manager in the WordPress admin area, you will be able to create one or more menus and add any type of link you wish. The menu management screen looks virtually the same as widget management screen, and appears to work similarly too.  Just call the menu you’ve created in your template, and you will never need to edit that template again to update your navigation links.  So clients can now change their navigation themselves if that’s something the design will allow them to do (horizontal navigation with limited space or with graphic text/buttons might not be good candidates for a dynamic menu).

But wait, there’s more…

If you have any upcoming features that you are looking forward to, or anything else to add, please share!  There are other things happening in the WordPress community that I haven’t mentioned, things like the community code of conduct and making it easier to participate, as well as other features and code changes, but I think this post is long enough as it is, and frankly I just don’t know enough about some of those initiatives. I’m always looking to learn more though so if you have any thoughts/links to share, please do.