Hi Everyone,

The Tazzu Wordpress Camp on Wednesday was a great event, and I’ll be discussing it in detail in a day or two. However I just wanted to post a few thoughts that I had during and after the event.

I thought it was kind of ironic that originally WordPress had been built as a blogging platform, and the majority of WP users only know it from that angle. However, I have been using WP for the last two or more years for everything but blogging. I’ve been using it to design websites, make catalogues, create mashups, and I’m currently planning a WPMu Social Network (God help me if BuddyPress doesn’t come out soon!).

I think WP is supreme for blogging, but my experience highlights the uniqueness of WP as a CMS application. There are many content management systems out there. I’ve used Microsoft CMS, Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress. I found WP to be quick to set up, easy to manipulate, and very flexible depending upon the developer’s goals. Some of the larger applications have more powerful engines that can do great things out of the box. However I think WP is so flexible and light-weight that using it has been irresistable for me.

The point of this post is to hint at the future. Over the next two years, I know WP and WPMu will start competing more head-on with the mainstream solutions out there. However, I wonder, will the concerns of the blogging community outweight the concerns of CMS developers who use WP? To whom will Automattic and the WP community give preference? At some point, for the community and for the application core, there is a fork in the road. Both paths leading out from there are great and worthy, but they are different and will be interesting to different types of audiences.

What I’d like to see is the WordPress core product splitting into two editions: WP for Blogs, and WP CMS. This way, we could grow out of the “posts” and “blogroll” terminology, and start using more website/content specific terminology. We could allow developers to not only custom sites for clients, but also custom dashboards and admin panels.  I know Matt Mullenweg hinted at his interest in the growing use of WP as a CMS during the recent WordCamp in Dallas (video), but how serious are they about it? I would love to see “WordPress Suite 2009″ of unique products, some of which are already available, each with its own focus: BBPress (forum), BuddyPress (social network), WordPress Mu (multiple blog hosting), WP CMS (websites & mashups), and the original WP Basic (blogs). I think it would help expand the WordPress brand, and provide unique solutions for all types of content developers and managers.

stay in high spirits

-k.s.

Hi Everyone,

I’d encourage you to do this on your blog if you’ve got some wishes for Wordpress. They have a section on the Wordpress site called Ideas, and the community ranks them. The Automattic team works on the highest ranked ideas, but for the programmers out there who love a challenge, you can check out some of the brilliant ideas and work on them as projects for plugins. So the things below are both a wish-list and a to-do list. These can be done by a programmer and WP professional, but the product would be more solid if the community and Automattic worked on them together. Here’s my list:

1) Importing & Exporting not just by author, but by category, or time range, or tag. Today there was a an interesting post by Jeff Chandler on the long way to export by category. However, a simple plugin would be awesome. This one’s obvious and it’s already on the list… and someday it WILL be a part of WP.

2) Really custom write panel. A write panel that works like NetVibes, PageFlakes, and iGoogle. There is a plugin called Custom Write Panel, and other similar ones, but none that goes the distance (without some modifying of your own). If you could, out of the box, define templates for types of posts you write, such as Post, Announcement, Review, Update, etc. Then based on those defined templates, you can define custom form fields that you would like to fill out for each type of post. I mean this can be done with modifications, but if it came ready to go out of the box, that would rock. (Clarification: this is not the same as a page template, which defines the markup/code/design of the page. This is about the input fields and the write panel).

3) BuddyPress. This wish is coming true some day. I can’t wait. Basically it will allow you to use WP Mu with some plugins and modifications to launch a social network. It can be (and has been) done with your own mods, but BuddyPress will probably have the checks and balances someone couldn’t achieve on their own.

4) WP linked to BBPress via comments. Basic functionality: you make a post, it is posted in your BBPress-powered forum (the first post will just have the title and link to avoid duplicate content). Then, all comments on the post are made as replies to that thread in your forum. People have been working on many WP bridges with VBulletin, phpBB, IPB, SMF, etc. but you’d think the easiest to bridge would be another Automattic product. This is more on the to-do list than the wishlist because I think it’s not that complicated, just need time to do it.

5) Post Macros. Maybe there is a plugin for this I haven’t found, but basically being able to set up posting of certain content at certain intervals; being able to schedule posts; and being able to perform specific actions on posts at certain times.

What is your wishlist? :)

stay in high spirits,

-k.s.