It has been only a couple of weeks since WordPress 2.6 has released and there is already talk about a much more feature rich version in the making. WordPress 2.7 has several exciting features planned/proposed as discussed in informal meetings on IRC and the feature votes being posted on the Codex. Though there are very few hints hint of a release date, I expect it to be released by the end of 2008.
[EDIT] Clarification: Mark Jaquith brings up a very good point that I believe requires re-iteration. The list of proposed features mentioned on weblogtoolscollection.com were just that, proposed features. All or none of them might actually show up in WordPress 2.7 Some things that have already started being worked on are the comments API and automated plugin installation. In hindsight, I realize that though they were represented as proposed, some of the other language in this post might have sounded a lot more definite. We apologize for any confusion that might have caused.
Here is a list of features that will be introduced into WordPress 2.7:
- Comments API – This according to me is the most exciting feature, it will allow developers to create offline integration of comments management, where users could use desktop clients to manage comments (moderate, edit, reply, delete, spam, unspam).
- Keyboard shortcuts for comment moderation – This feature will help users to quickly moderate comments using keyboard shortucts, so you can expect key combinations like Ctrl + S to spam a comment, Ctrl + A to approve and so on.
- Theme Update API – WordPress 2.5 and above have really made plugin management quite easy, you automatically receive notices when a new update to a plugin is available and can upgrade it without having to manually upload it to your FTP server. With this addition WordPress aims to bridge the gap between theme developers and the users for publishing updates to themes.
- One Click Plugin Installs – Installing a plugin will be much easier with One click plugin installs. A plugin with similar features called One Click Plugin was the winner of the Plugin Competition last year.
- WordPress core updates – This is a feature many users have been waiting for, with core updates you can easily upgrade your WordPress versions. The WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin performs the same task.
- Default Sitemaps – WordPress 2.7 will include a default sitemap creator, which will create Google XML sitemaps for your blog. Google Sitemaps Generator plugin is the best option available right now for creating XML sitemaps.
- Admin Panel Comment Replies – This plugin will help administrators to reply to comments using the admin panel. There are several plugins which allow you to do so right now, including WP AJax Edit Comments, Better Comments Manager and Absolute Comments.
- Comment Threading – This feature will allow users to reply to other commentators in a threaded manner, where replied comments will display below the actual comment, WordPress already has the ability to scale to accomodate threaded comments, without requiring database changes. Brian’s Threaded Comments is a does the job of allowing users to reply to comments.
- Subscribe to Comments – The WordPress team is also planning to include a option to allow commentators to subscribe to follow up comments, but this is marked as a question, so it may not actully make it into WordPress 2.7. The Subscribe to Comments plugin does the job to notify commentators on follow up comments.
- Widgets for Dashboard and Write Box – This feature will allow users to re-arrange the widgets on the dashboard and write page to suit their preferences.
- Batch Editing of Posts – This feature will allow users to batch edit their posts. Though there is not much information available about this right now, and I could not really find more from my research on the topic.
With WordPress 2.7, we may see many popular plugins retire because of direct integration into WordPress core but we should have better functionality and easier management of daily blogging tasks from within the vanilla WordPress install.
There are several other interesting features, you can take a look at them by visiting WordPress codex. Thanks to QuickOnlineTips for drawing my attention to the new features.
What features are you looking the WordPress team to integrate? Do let me know. It would be great to hear what your expectations are.
Dislaimer: WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin and Better Comments Manager plugin has been written by me.
Keith,
A quick correction. Ajax Edit Comments only allows the editing of comments, not replying. The 2.0 version of the plugin is featured as my link. Thanks for the mention.
Release dates are, although subject to revision, posted on the roadmap.
I’d like them to integrate less integration please. I explained my view in a recent post: http://www.wp-fun.co.uk/2008/0.....needs-yet/
hehe power is bobo
Oh, and I would like the plugin uninstaller that I wrote a patch for before 2.5 to be included. I am hoping the one click installer you mention comes with an uninstaller.
From the Codex page: “versioning of template edits” – could anyone elaborate on this?
Andrew: you might want to take a look at ticket 7091, then.
I think with the introduction of “Comments API”, we will see comments management in the WordPress iPhone App.
Oh No, the above comment should not been a reply.
I would love the ability to switch off the post revisions feature. Its a cool feature, really, but its slightly unnecessary for some blogs…
or revisions expired time… after several days the revision is auto deleted… how about it?
Add this to your wp-config.php:
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);More at this post
Wow. That sounds great!
Yes, upgrade WordPress in one simple click will be great! 🙂
Sharon: you can already turn off post revisions.
@Ronald thanks for the clarifications
@Andrew,
I agree, I might look at it this weekend. It would also be good to have a options page link hook added as well.
I would love to see threaded comments plugin from the core – ala drupal but i would love the option to make the comments follow the post on the index page… turning the front page into a b3ta like threaded comments message board. i know this is possible with hacking but i want it out of the box
As long as its not getting bloated this futures sounds great.
Lots of good stuff on the way. If all goes to plan, I’ll be able to get rid of at least five plugins!
I’m not sure how I feel about auto-updating themes. It’d be really easy to make a big un-fixable oops with a theme update than with a plugin update.
I’d love a keyboard shortcut to include editing of comments. If the same shortcut could be used to open editing of a post or page (context sensitive), that’d be all the better.
Perhaps retro, but I would also like the chance to see the titles of my last 10 posts somewhere on the Admin page.
Can’t wait for the official release…
Really like the new feature….
I like the new features in 2.7
It should make things a lot easier to manage in my blog http://www.EZLinkBuilding.com
Thanks!
The wordpress core update and sitemap inclusion is the best update in 2.7 and secondly theme update is also a very useful feature for all wordpress bloggers.
WordPress going better time by time.
WordPress 2.7 looks great and yes embedding many popular plugins in WordPress itself will make things better.
A big thanks to all the plugin creators. I think they should be happy as there is work is good enough to be included in WordPress itself.
I can’t wait. Good stuff there, not just flash. Solid, useful features.
I’d really like a way to see the syndicated views of posts in the WP stats. If you aren’t on WP.com it only shows onsite views.
@Matt Algren Auto-updating themes is a great idea—as long as you’re using a child theme to modify your parent theme. It helps too if you’re using a theme that makes this process easy, like, The Sandbox, Tarski or Thematic. Check out my blog (ThemeShaper). I’ve been harping on this for months now, getting ready for WordPress 2.7.
And generally: Wow. There’s a lot of cool stuff in 2.7. Looking forward to it.
Comment replying and threading without plugins needed. Awesome!
Seems the changes are going to be significant. I like the idea of having the built in sitemaps, id love to see more plugins already out there being built into the hardcode of wordpress.
Can’t wait for the new version to come out. Keep up the great work.
IMHO, comment threading is really the killer feature. For those that find all the plugins to be either too hard to install or inaccessible, this is great news. BTW, this is the first time I’ve seen “according to me” in English. In Esperanto, you often see “la? mi”, but I didn’t think that particular phrasing existed in English. Are you a native speaker?
The BEST threaded comment plugin WITH email notification of a REPLY TO YOUR COMMENT… NOT EVERY COMMENT… is:
WordPress Thread Comment
I use it on my website.. I have 30,000 subscribed members and I get about 20,000 pageviews a day from people comeing back to the website to answer comments that have replied to their specific comment. Much more powerful than a subscribe to the whole thread plugin… which tends to piss people off especially when my posts get about 300-400 comments.
Just my 2 cents. 🙂
Marina
All right, I will try it out. 🙂
This is the second nesting reply.
This is the third nesting reply.
Aaand…the last one!
re: the Batch Editing, I wonder if it’s an internalization of the Find/Replace plugin that broke with 2.6. Would be a nice feature.
@Ian, thanks for the info. Yeah, this could push more designers to build their themes in the parent/child model. Interesting ideas.
As someone said upthread, this looks like a pretty meaty update, feature-wise.
The comments features sound like good ideas, though I’d prefer to see more features that enhance a broader range of functionality.
I use upwards of maybe 20 plugins on my blog, including every cache and jscript compression plugin that I can find. Some of them are really basic too, such as the recent/similar posts plugins. It would be nice to find some of those kind of features integrated into wordpress. Maybe a feature that allows for custom queries on posts, pages, and cats from within the wordpress core, instead of having to use resource intensive plugins or core hacks.
For that last one you listed though, that new plugin from your contest recently, Manageable, is a good plugin to model that feature after.
the features sound great but how about fixing 2.6? I had to uninstall it and go back 2.51. There’s alot of scrolling going on…
Good future wordpress, good 🙂
I really, really could use the option of batch editing posts in the pending review. I need a solution due to the amount of posts I get in a unique way everyday. It’s a bit much to have to click each pending review and hit publish and then click out to the next pending review. It takes a while. So if 2.7 managed pending review much like comments are handled it would so great! I look forward to more developments to wordpress.
Ian, Matt: it’ll make even more sense to use child themes in 2.7, because you can now override parent theme template files with child ones.
Love to see the update core feature. What I need is
* Better User control (Role Manager)
* Revisions of metadata (custom fields)
* Admin themes (not just a css file but like normal themes, mayby use same theme files so public and admin could look the same)
* Public Profile page where user (if logged in could make changes)
* Register options (there are some plugins for this)
* Better / easier integration with bbPress
* Better search (like Better search plugin)
* Better db stuff (there are plugins for this today)
My two cents 🙂
* Public
I’d like a way to define a new widget (typically a text widget plus some content) and save it with a name.
I’d also like a multi-widget: a widget that I can set up with the names of a number of other widgets, and which will render one of those widgets at random or round-robin.
(And you can see how these two features could be used in combination…..)
Am I overlooking something or is an options for a database backup not included in this 2.7 version? I’m now using the wp-database-backup plugin to send daily backups to my gmail account, but I really think this is such an important part of maintaining a weblog that it should be part of the WP itself.
Other features which I think should become part of WP? A lot, that’s because people are writing plugins ;), but here are a few which I think are almost needed in every weblog:
1. Maintainance mode plugin (‘We’re sorry, but we’re offline for a moment…’)
2. Using php-code inside posts (not a plugin, should be an option inside WP)
3. And Lester Chan has made some great plugins which I think should become part of WP, like simple print and e-mail buttons to print or e-mail post content.
Most of these changes sound great by themselves, but I’m a little worried about bloat.
I’m wondering why the approach has changed. I remember Matt saying (a little repetively) that they were determined to keep the core lean and people could extend the functionality using plugins. Now they’re building a whole heap of plugins in. What made them change their approach?
Having said that, if they do it right, 2.7 will be great. Most of the functionality they are adding are things that either everyone uses a plugin for or which they would use if it was there.
The Codex also mentions “GeoData for posts, comments, attachments, etc.”, not in the above list. That would be great to see. Although plugins like Geo Mashup already allow geotagging of posts, I’ve yet to see anything that lets commenters geotag their response (other than inaccurate reverse geocoding by IP address). Curious!
As the Project Coordinator, I’d like to see WordPress make use of the Geotag Icon of course (as Geo Mashup already does).
It’s good that WP is adding new features, but there are still things that needs to be fixed first. Latest 2.6 version introduced a lot of problems for plugin/theme developers with ‘move your wp-content folder’ feature. Because of that there are only small number of plugins that are really WP2.6 compatibile. Any plugin that adds tinimce3 plugin for easier use will break in the case of changed wp-content position. I think that this is the first thing that need a quick solution right now in 2.6.1 version. If not I think that a lot of good plugins will suffer.
I really like the new “Media Library” uploader, but one of the things I would like to see is a space to add css styling to the individual and gallery images for each post.
This way, it would completely replace “Imagemanager” plugin for me, and others i’m sure.
i hope they add an option for removing old post revision , that cause database goes huge after several saves and edit 🙁
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i agree with Stephen that wordpress core should be kept lighter.Well when we have plugins , why should the core get bloated.i also do not understand, when people say that these features are good to have in the core.
@Ashfame, can you pls. explain how embedding many popular plugins in WordPress itself will make things better?
Perhaps I’ve missed this, but I would really like a way to simply upgrade plugins automatically with one click for all that have upgrades so that I don’t have to take the time to do this manually, one by one. I realize that sometimes that may not be the best idea, but my plugins have been so stable and I haven’t had problems.
One Click Plugin Installs sounds really interesting, especiallly for non skilled users it will be a good thing.
Keep on blogging
Johannes
netjobbers.de
Looks like WP2.7 is going to be a smash! The one click plugin installation and wordpress core update definitely grabbed my attention – although I still stick to the good old way of manually updating WordPress (since sometimes automated processes will mess things up), I will definitely welcome the one-click way of upgrading WP! Built-in sitemaps for WP blog will definitely be extremely handy and useful 🙂
Speaking of threaded comments, WordPress Thread Comment does a really great job at it too! I’ve been using it for months and everything is running well.
That looks like an excellent collection. I can use the admin panel replies built in by default. Can’t wait for it to come out
I must be mental if this excites me THAT much, but…
YAY FOR COMMENT THREADING!
Thanks for the update. WP 2.7 is looking good! All great, esp. with the Write>Post page changes, my pet peeve with 2.5 to 2.6 since I had to use hacks. Cheers.
does anyone know if their are plans for a desktop app in the wordpress future. Something like MarsEdit, but specifically for WordPress.
This will be more rocking! as it happens always with newer versions of WP..
The main feature I would like to see implemented is the removal of the word “category” in category permalinks. I know there are plugins to remove it but doing so disables the previous & next links to work in category archives.
The url’s look ridiculous with site name/category/actual category title & we should not be forced to use a different custom structure other than %postname%/%posttitle% if we want it to work properly. I prefer it with that structure & feel it should work for our needs.
Hopefully we see some updates to BBpress in WP 2.7 along with all of the above!
Please. add massive actions to Gallery… For example that we can choose 5 photos and erase them, or move them, etc.
Thanks!
Batch editing the posts would be useful. Just recently I introduced a new category and needed to apply it to ALL posts to date. It’s been a long process to have to open each one and turn the category on. Make it a blanket exercise perhaps?… check box the ones to action…?
Definitely a simple set of Dashboard widgets would be good. So I can tailor the view to suit my regular tasks.
Please provide an easy way to disable the “post revisions” feature (without needing to mess with php-config).
Thanks a lot!
While I think that not having to install each time the same plugins would be great, I have some concerns about growing of the wp core. Me too I’m a big fan of “slight core” “many plugins”…
So I’m hoping that at least that (new) functionalities will be added as (default) plugins, not as core-functions… or we’ll see a lot of disablet-this-or-that plugins…
Another way to consider is building different WP distribution: one “core stricly”, others enhanced with various plugin and themes for different uses.
The poeple behind the official Italian WP localisation (http://www.wordpress-it.it) are doing this with WordPress XXL: I don’t like their choiche of plugins but the idea is smart.
I definitely like the idea of Widgets for Dashboard and Write Box. I really don’t like the current method with 2.6
Thanks
oh, when is the release anticipated?
i still have wordpress 2.1 installed, i want to upgrade to 2.6 but i guess it will be a mess and i scared to screw it all, my question here is: should i wait to version 2.7 so i get that new plug in you talk about, or somebody can gimme a hand with that! thank you guys
This is a list of proposed features. We got a bunch of people together in IRC, threw out suggestions, and voted on them. Everyone had 10 “+1s” and an unlimited amount of “-1s”. On the codex page, the number of “i” characters indicates the finally tally for that feature. So, for example, Subscribe to Comments in core netted only one vote (and it wasn’t mine — I voted against it!). And just because a proposed features has a lot of votes, doesn’t mean it’ll end up in 2.7.
Some things that have already started being worked on are the comments API and automated plugin installation.
I have to say, that’s disappointing. Why wouldn’t you want to include something like, for example, native xml sitemaps or movable widgets on the dashboard? Those seem like slam dunks to me.
What’s the argument against them when things like, again for example, gallery shortcodes and gravatar support are now part of the core?
There’s a default argument against adding any feature. Features, once added, are hard to remove. They carry a support burden. Movable dashboard widgets seem like a winner to me. I think the benefits outweigh the costs. I’m not so sure about XML Sitemaps. In my experience, I’ve found them to be more trouble than they are worth. They take a performance toll on the site when you generate them, and they don’t scale well. I also think that they’re of most use to sites with poor interlinking. Blogs don’t have that problem! WordPress blogs in particular are well interlinked. So the only real benefit you have is the ability to give “weights” and “recrawl” times to crawlers. Again, hasn’t really been a problem for me. My posts show up in Google results fewer than 10 minutes after being published, thanks to Ping-O-Matic. And I find it’s easier to control weight by telling Google not to index my category, month, year, and day permalink pages.
What do you think about giving WordPress a muti-language integration?
I mean integrating qtranslate language switcher or a new one.
I second that.
It feels like plugin integration into the core is nice, then again – it can just stay as plugin (and maybe get bundled into the downloaded file of WP).
muti-language integration, on the other hand, is a feature that is essential for WP to grow as a worldwide platform, and is not supported straight of the box – which is a shame.
While writing this I have in mind the Hebrew WP branch. that although it is being handled fantastic, is still appart from the main branch – and I should guess other Right-To-Left languages would suffer the same fate from WP.
I DO hope this will be ammended before WP 3.0 🙂
I’m getting more and more frustated with the fact that every new major release of WordPress brings several new features that i don’t really need. In my opinion, security updates should be released separately from new features.
For now we’ll just have to wait until the list for new features is definitive, but i really do hope that there will be an easy way to disable / remove the functions i don’t need. There are 11 proposed new features for 2.7, and i don’t need a single one.
Maybe it’s time to release a WordPress light version….