[wp-hackers] Development for 2.next

[Dougal Campbell]

Owen Winkler wrote:
> Ryan Boren wrote:
>> What else?
> 
> * Built-in pseudo-cron with matching hooks to go along with future posting.

I'd be in favor of pseudo-cron in the core. It would just be such a 
useful thing. Interesting plugins could arise from hooks like 
'new_hour', 'new_day', 'new_week', 'new_month', and 'new_year', among 
other ideas.

> * Atom 1.0/Feed Engine.

+1. Atom 0.3 was deprecated before we released 2.0. We really need to go 
ahead and add a proper Atom 1.0 feed.

> * Implement Atom *commenting/posting* API.

+1. However, unless the specs have changed a lot from last time I 
looked, this might be problematic. From what I saw, the posting API 
required the use of the PUT and DELETE HTTP verbs, in addition to the 
usual GET and POST. PUT is supported in most places, but *many* server 
configurations don't support HTTP DELETE out of the box. So unless 
there's an alternate method in the specs, this might only be doable on a 
limited number of web servers.

> * Rework comments to use API (with new filtering hooks!) instead of 
> direct queries.

+1. And also +1 for comment meta.

> * Rework categories to use API (with new filtering hooks!) instead of 
> direct queries.

+1. We should have category meta, as well. Oh, and to be complete, there 
should be link meta for the link manager.

> * Include vital notices ("Upgrade available!", "Security release 
> available!"), customize the feeds, and add more plugin hooks to the 
> Dashboard.

+1 for upgrade notices. But rather than checking every time you visit 
the dashboard, I'd suggest either using a "Check for updates" button, or 
a weekly pseudo-cron (see, a use case!).

> * Better/new default theme - something more easily customized by casual 
> HTML coders.

Yes, more "official" default themes. Or one really cool, mega-flexible, 
backend-configurable one. "Sidebar1: left/right/none", "Sidebar2: 
left/right/none", "Footer: yes/no", "Archive links: 
Sidebar1/Sidebar2/none", "Choose a header graphic", etc. With separate 
settings for the single template. Pipe dream?

> * Improved post/page search functionality.

Global and run-time configuration allowing searching of pages and 
comments in addition to posts. A simple recursive descent parser for 
boolean logic searches would be pretty cool. "(boot .or. saddle) .and. 
horse". I guess that could be a plugin, if we have the right API hooks.

> * Extend themes to the login page, add login hardening (3 strikes, etc.)

Yes, allowing themes to have their own login.php and register.php would 
be nice.

Also, pluggable error pages. When MySQL dies, we could check for a 
constant in wp-config.php that defines a user-defined error page to 
display instead of our usual "Error establishing database connection" 
message.

> * Produce fudge swirl ice cream.

Fudge swirl might be a good start. But I think our eventual goal should 
be to produce Rocky Road and Tutti Frutti.

-- 
Dougal Campbell <dougal at gunters.org>
http://dougal.gunters.org/