WordPress Wishes

Chris Coyier — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:42:50 +0000

Happy New Year all! I’m looking forward to what will hopefully be an awesome year, with WordPress and otherwise. I thought I’d take the opportunity to wish-o-wish upon a star and toss out some things I think would be really cool to see happen in the WordPress world.

Subscribe To Comments, rebuilt for modern WordPress

This is an incredibly popular plugin, and we use it right here on Digging Into WordPress. It still works with 2.9, but it hasn’t been updated since 2007-12-14. There is no admin panel to speak of, and the management screen that does exist looks like this:

I would love to see this re-built, designed up, and intergrated into the Admin area of WordPress.

Publishing a page, main action button

If you publish a lot of Pages in WordPress, you can feel me on this one.

Approved comments to all admins

For posts that Jeff writes, when someone comments, Jeff gets an email and I don’t. When I write an article and someone comments, I get an email but Jeff doesn’t. There should be some kind of way (plugin?) where we both get emails about comments.

Feature/Bury comments

Alright this one I think would be a HUGELY awesome idea for a plugin. Two more buttons for comment moderation:

All the plugin does is add this information to the comment data somehow. When all the comments are output with wp_list_comments, the only thing that happens is a “featured” or “bury” class is applied to the list items classes:

Then it is up to the theme designer to integrate styling or functionality with these hook. Imagine special backgrounds for featured comments, or gray-ing down buried comments. I could even see this being in the WordPress core, as a way to really enhance the readability of long comment threads through admin moderation.

Style-XXXX.css

I like the Art Direction plugin* for it’s ability to add code into the section for any particular Post or Page. This gives the ability to add CSS or JavaScript unique to a page and all the possibilities that brings.

Another way to approach this would be to have your theme automatically look for the presence of a CSS file unique to it on the server somewhere. Probably in the format “style-%PAGE-ID%.css”. If this file exists, it appends it into the head and uses it. If not, it doesn’t. That way styling a post is as simple as chucking in a CSS file of the proper name and writing code.

* Important note about the Art Direction Plugin: it breaks caching plugins. I’m sure many of you use caching plugins like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. The combo of these plugins will wreak all kinds of havoc on your site. Frederick Townes has re-wrote the art direction plugin for my use on CSS-Tricks, and we’ve tried to submit it to the author be he hasn’t done anything with it yet.

Rules for turning comments off

There is one setting under Settings > Discussion for when you want comments turned off on all Posts/Pages. It’s fairly common on bigger sites to turn off comments on older content. After a certain amount of time relevant conversation dies off and turns into all spam and makes moderating comments on the site a much bigger job.

However, there might be certain content on a site which may make sense to have different durations for open comments. An opinionated blog article, maybe 2 weeks. A snippet of code, perhaps a year would be better. I think it would be cool to be able to set how long comments stay open. Perhaps based on what page template is in use, or the category applied.

That’s all I gots for now. Food for thought.

Digging into WordPress » wishes