WordPress is a great blog software. This made making this list extremely hard. It’s more of a personal list, I’m not sure if all of the changes I suggested here would help everyone. You can share your own suggestions for WordPress at the bottom by leaving a comment. I may make a follow up list with other ideas that people suggest, so please take the time and leave your thoughts. :)

1. Upgrade Plugins with SFTP. Currently, WordPress only allows you to upgrade plugins via FTP or FTPS. For those who aren’t familiar with the different types of FTP, SFTP is not the same as FTPS. SFTP is SSH FTP: it allows you to use SSH (port 22) for FTP (port 21). I don’t have an FTP server on my server, and I don’t plan on adding one. I use SSH everyday though. This might not help everyone, but there are certainly other people with this problem: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/199359.
   UPDATE: Actually, it’s possible to do this. Find more information at: Auto-Update WordPress with SFTP.
   

   WordPress allows you to update plugins with FTP or FTPS, but not SFTP.

2. Delete all empty tags. Before I really knew what I was doing, I put a lot of extra tags on
   

   WordPress should allow you to delete all tags without any posts attached.

   my posts. I had tags like content, tag, and a bunch of other random tags. I changed all of the tags on the posts, but then I had a lot of abandoned tags. WordPress should have an option to delete all tags without posts. This would make life easier. Personally, I am OCD about having extra tags on my website. Headspace kept suggesting tags that were random and too general. I had around 8 pages of unecessary tags, so it took a little while to delete all of the them.

3. Formally remove plugins. WordPress has alot of random little tips involving plugins, such as this one:
   

   If something goes wrong with a plugin and you can’t use WordPress, delete or rename that file in the /var/www/gulati.info/wp-content/plugins directory and it will be automatically deactivated.

   Ok, so I can delete the files of a plugin if it isn’t working. What about all of the changes that it made to my theme? What about all of the stuff that it added to the database?
   WordPress should have a formal uninstall function for plugins. This is pretty abstract, since WordPress will basically have to reverse engineer the installation method for the plugin, but I think that it is possible. This is WordPress, impossible is nothing.

4. Do a little more out of the box. Currently, WordPress boasts it’s ‘Famous 5-minute Install‘. It’s great that WordPress installs so fast, but there is still a lot to do before your WordPress installation is ready. You will need to find a theme to use, and install that, and then install necessary plugins. I’m not saying that WordPress itself should do more – the plugin-driven system is great. Maybe WordPress should offer larger installation packages – ones that include necessary plugins. They should choose the most popular and most secure plugins to include with some builds of WordPress (obviously, you can always select for a clean build). Perhaps a poll should be created to vote on the plugins to include?
5. OpenID integration out of the box. It’s time that WordPress made up it’s mind. Currently, you
   

   WordPress should integrate OpenID into the core package.

   can get a plugin to use OpenID, but I think that it should be included with the core package. OpenID is leading the market of seamless web applications. Also, WordPress could get paid $5000 for integrating OpenID. So why not?

These are just my ideas. Personally, I think that these would make WordPress better. You are welcome to share your ideas by leaving a comment. You can also check out more information on WordPress 2.8, the next version of WordPress, here.

Tags: Blog Software, WordPress, WordPress Needs, WordPress Plugins