Some Missing Features in WordPress

The popular publishing platform, WordPress, released its latest major version: WordPress 3.0 (dubbed "Thelonious"). This iteration of WordPress introduces plenty of convenient new features such as drag-and-drop interfaces for building navigation menus (for those not comfortable modifying their theme files), the ability to deploy multiple sites under one installation (by the inclusion of WordPress MU) and a system for making custom content types other than posts and pages.

However, some new features appear to be superfluous. Why have a built-in link shortener (yet not include social media web service integration that benefit from link shortening)? Why release a new default theme every year? Is it really worth the increase in the code base’s bulk to give end-users an interface for designing custom headers?

With all of that in mind, let’s go over some of what I believe are missing features in WordPress.

1. Web Caching

Every time a visitor views a web page in a WordPress-powered site, the system performs multiple server-side processes and database queries to generate that page for the visitor. This affects the speed in which a web page can be rendered and — for people running the publishing platform on an underpowered web server — can cause major down times and slowdowns.

One of the best ways to improve page performance is through web caching files on the web server — storing static versions of each web page so that the system doesn’t have to perform redundant work whenever a page is requested.

This feature should be an optional feature that WordPress site administrators can enable, with option settings on how long to keep the cached files that they can tweak according to their site’s updating frequency and traffic load.

2. Displaying Related Posts

Findability can be greatly improved if related content is displayed on a post. Right now, theme developers can take advantage of the get_category/get_categories for pulling out the posts’ category and wp_get_post_tags for the post’s tags, however, what’s more difficult is displaying related posts.

There are ways to try and display related posts, such as picking, say, 5 random posts from the same category/categories or posts tagged with the same words. However, the accuracy of how related the queried posts will be to the current post is, a lot of times, poor.

There should be more "signals" to determine the relevancy of one post to another, such as seeing if the title of posts have the same words, how many tags are the same on both posts, and if the current post links to another post.

3. Social Media Integration for Popular Web Services

An essential feature of content-centered sites is the ability for its users to share published content. Blogs that don’t have social media buttons and sharing options using email are uncommon.

I think it’s relevant to include native integration for at least the popular web services like Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon and Facebook so that end-users don’t have to rely on and maintain third-party plugins.

Social media integration is so commonplace that the "twitter" plugin tag is a popular tag amongst more general keyword tags such as "Post", "widget", "image", and "sidebar."

4. Site Statistics

The capacity to learn about what content works and what doesn’t is key to being able to produce content that people view the most. The tool that’s central to this understanding of our content is website analytics.

The Automattic team, founders of WordPress and WordPress.com, has developed a statistics plugin that’s among the top WordPress plugins installed — it gets over 30,000 downloads per week.

The plugin shows administrators top referrers (where visitors are coming from), popular posts, site traffic statistics, and a pretty line graph that visualizes site traffic trends.

It’s time to adopt this plugin into WordPress.

5. Web Form Builder

HTML web forms are crucial to most modern sites: They’re the primary means of enabling communication and input from users. Comments, surveys, polls, contact forms, and content submissions are all large components of content-driven sites and they all need web forms.

Having a form builder interface, similar to the navigation and header builders that came with WordPress 3.0, can help users create custom web forms to increase interaction with site visitors.

6. Content Rating

The ability to rate content, including user comments, pages, and other content types is a good design pattern for increasing user participation. Content rating opens up a lot of possibilities, such as displaying a dynamic list of the most popular content based on user rating on the sidebar or the ability to sort archives based on popularity.

Content rating can also help the site owner identify content that users like so they can make more of it. Additionally, under the expertise of a theme developer, it can help with site maintenance, such as in the case of auto-deletion of spam comments if a comment is downvoted a lot or flagged as spam.