It first started out as a discussion on the WordPress Hackers mailing list concerning the addition of email notifications to the core of WordPress to keep administrators abreast of new versions of WordPress as they were released. The discussion became long winded but a response by Lynne Pope provided one of those why didn’t I think of that moments.

Change the sample data – instead of, “this is a post”, provide some meaningful information. With a link to subscribe to WP-Announce. Make an entry announcing that WP-Announce is being used, so this will show in the dashboard feeds. Bloggers will quickly pick up on this and news of it will spread.

Needless to say, her idea sparked a series of kudos with other suggestions for what to include in the sample data. Then, in a WordPress development chat regarding the topic that was discussed on the hackers mailing list, it was agreed that the best course of action would be to not only revive the WP-Announcements mailing list, but to also change the Hello World! post in WordPress to something more useful. A fellow by the name of Demetris took it upon himself to create a draft of what the sample data should be. The discussion surrounding the change including links to see drafts and revisions were included in ticket number 11008. The ticket has been open for two weeks and in today’s developer chat, Demetris published a link to his draft which you can view here. There was a unanimous decision to include the sample post data into the core of WordPress starting with version 2.9. If the sample data needs editing, it will be done throughout the beta process before the stable release.

There you have it. A time line of events that happened in quick succession which provided a small change with huge benefits without having one line of code written. Let me know your thoughts in the comments with regards to the new sample data that will be provided in any new installation of WordPress starting with 2.9.

Over the weekend, I happened to come across a post written by Andrew Rickmann which showcased an idea to create a configure link next next to the usual Activate/Deactivate Edit links found within the Plugin Management panel.

Andrew’s point of view is that, instead of adding top level menu items to the WordPress administration panels, it would be far easier to click on a configure link that would open up a sliding panel which would present anywhere from 1-5 configurable settings. Not only does this idea make configuring plugins faster, but it makes browsing the WordPress administration panel much easier as the top level navigation system is not filled with links. On top of that, the configure link makes complete sense to be located next to the Deactivate/Edit links. In doing so, configuration options are in a predictable location.

In my opinion, here are a couple of reasons why we are not seeing something like this already being used. Number one, WordPress is open source meaning anytime you try to implement anything close to a standard, it probably won’t work. People will come up with their own solutions to the problem which is one of the beauties of Open Source but can also be a contributing problem. Secondly, this was brought up over two years ago. You can see the initial forum thread here and the post on the WP-Hackers Mailing List from Owen here. Considering we have gone two years without any move towards a solution such as the one Andrew suggested, perhaps we will always be at the mercy as to where plugin authors place their configuration links.

Plugin authors can bring up the fact that they provide directions within their readme files that indicate where to find the configuration page. While they may help in the short term, that doesn’t solve the root of the overall problem. Andrew’s idea is something that can be implemented by plugin authors right now. In terms of something like this being added to the core, according to Andrew, the process is so simple, it probably doesn’t need to be added.

Where do you stand on this issue? Would you like to see more plugin authors implement Andrew’s idea into their own plugin or is there a better alternative?