WordPress is a marvelous thing. Easy to install, easy to work with, free (OpenSource), has lots of themes and plugins. I am a huge fan of WordPress and use it on a number of sites, and I am extremely grateful for the enormous effort by the good people at WordPress.org, Matt Mullenweg, and the other people behind it for providing me and bloggers all over the world with this wonderful CMS platform.

Today WordPress can do you about everything and look any way you like it to look. Where should it go from here? I am sure there are as many answers to that question as there are WordPress bloggers. So, I too have opinions.

I want one thing only: Speed! A faster WordPress! Faster, more efficient plugins and themes. Google is making speed one of the factors that affects search engine ranking. So speed is much more of a concern now than it was just a year ago.

And WordPress has grown fat over the years. It can’t compete with html-sites for speed and as a result will increasingly lose out in the search engines. I would like to see everything included in installs being minimized and optimized. I spend time on my installs minimizing CSS and javascripts and optimizing images. To send out WordPress, plugins and themes where a bunch of files have not been optimized (minimal size, fastest possible execution time) is bad.

Also, I would like to see the developers working on minimizing the number of MySQL queries and proving options for simple “hard-coding” of stuff that can reduce the number of queries even further (site URL, name, etc.), preferably all in one simple-to-edit file.

Furthermore, I would like to see plugins and themes where everything is minimized in size as well, and using the CSS and Javascript libraries of WordPress (to minimize file loads) as much as possible. Plugin authors should provide info about the amount of overhead their plugins impose – some of the plugins out there today are extremely demanding and eat lots of CPU-cycles.

Finally – I would like to see cache plugins for WordPress that create optimized, minimized HTML-pages for the cache, without tons and tons of blank spaces and tabs (they too use bandwidth and take time to load in readers’ browsers).

That’s what I wish for from WordPress in the future!

©2012 nekkidblogger. All Rights Reserved.

If you are considering upgrading to WordPress 2.8, I seriously want to warn you: Do not do it! WordPress 2.8 may contain some improvements, but it is a major scandal!

I have been stupid enough to upgrade several of my blogs, and am currently paying dearly for it. I trusted WordPress as it has been great in the past. But the results are extremely bad for me.  Some older themes do not function as they should with the new version of WordPress. As well, a large number of widgets to not work. And in addition, some of the admin screens do not work either.

This has cost me a lot of money, as some “premium themes” which I have paid for will have to be thrown out and new ones installed. Also, it has cost me many, many hours of work.

WordPress does not communicate openly about this, and do not warn people of these major problems. In my opinion, this is extremely bad! I am deeply disappointed!

©2012 nekkidblogger. All Rights Reserved.