Thought Experiment: WordPress.org

[Otto]

Things I'm seeing here (and my thoughts):

PMs: Only if they can be hidden. Preferably, no. I hate PMs. That's just me, but email is better.

Sigs: I'm not against them. But definitely text only, short, and non-spammy links. Maybe links only for established users.

Seamless login: ABSOLUTELY. Top priority. Now that everything lives at *.wordpress.org, having it not know who your are is unacceptable.

Run it on WordPress based products: For most stuff, yes. MediaWiki is still too useful, reproducing it would just make something inferior at first, and the codex has tons of useful info in it now. bbPress needs upgrading and better integration first. Maybe when it's a plugin...

Extend: Definitely needs some work, but this is kinda integrated into the plugin/theme searching in wp.org installs, so there needs to be careful handling here.

Book Page: That one is new to me! :D

Report to moderator: Hell, the whole forum needs a design overhaul.. One more for the list.

Searching: HELL TO THE YES. I use Google to search the forum. That's just silly.

Profiles: Should be integral to the system. And better. Of course.

Trac: Should be integral to the system. I like trac, many disagree with me though.

Integrated tools for Firefox et al: Not as concerning to me, but nice idea.

Design: I agree that it needs an overhaul, to make it fresh and such. The question is what to include, design decisions, etc. I think functionality will trump the look at first, with a slow integration of pieces (islands) into the thing.

BuddyPress: I'm not convinced. Yet. I need to learn more about it, the few BP sites I've seen are unimpressive to me. Confusing. Maybe it's me.

Paint: Well, obviously it has to be *pretty*. :)

[JohnM]

Good luck with your new job.

Theres so much that could have been improved at wordpress.org its hard to know where to begin.

The plugin repository really needs a better classification system than tags. With almost 10.000 plugins its really hard to find stuff, and a better categorization and search system would be really valuable.

I`m not sure how it may be done though, but a faceted navigation would be the optimal solution.

[Otto]

You know, I've always found faceted navigation systems like that to be extremely difficult to use. Often times, they just get in my way and make things far more difficult and slow. Newegg and Amazon are two prime examples that spring to mind. I know what I want, keyword searching is faster than trying to navigate some randomly constructed set of menus that don't have the keywords I'm looking for in them.

[JLeuze]

The plugin repository really needs a better classification system than tags. With almost 10.000 plugins its really hard to find stuff, and a better categorization and search system would be really valuable.

I agree, the plugin repository is tough to weed through. What I'd like is if old plugins that haven't been updated since like 2.3 didn't show up unless I went specifically hunting for them.

If it could only show up to date plugins by default that would be great, but I'd be happy with an easy way to filter them.

Of course you can't expect every plugin author to update their plugin quickly, or those compatibility options to be used regularly, so it would probably be a good idea if it went back a few versions by default.

[chipbennett]

Good luck with your new job.

Theres so much that could have been improved at wordpress.org its hard to know where to begin.

The plugin repository really needs a better classification system than tags. With almost 10.000 plugins its really hard to find stuff, and a better categorization and search system would be really valuable.

I`m not sure how it may be done though, but a faceted navigation would be the optimal solution.

For the plugin repository, most definitely.

I would love to see plugins sortable/filter-able by use (front-end/theme, Admin UI, utilities, etc.) and/or by features (has widgets, has shortcodes, etc.). Perhaps most importantly, WP-version required, tested, and supported (I'm using WP 2.9.2. If I'm searching for a plugin, I don't want the results to include a plugin that has only been updated/tested up through WP version 2.3.)

While we're on the topic of the plugin repository:

1) Popularity ranking: Otto, do you know what the algorithm is? It's clearly not simply overall downloads. I'd like to see some further refinement:

a) Install base (total downloads divided by # released versions. It needs to be a bit more sophisticated than that, but to do so would require some historical download trending across plugin version releases.)
b) Most popular since last WP version release
c) Most downloaded (since most recent plugin version release only)
d) Most downloaded in the past (some timeframe: day, week, month, year, etc.)

2) Fix the search!

3) Plugin author profiles: not all are linked from the plugin landing page. They should be.

4) Plugin developer admin tools: each plugin's support forum has an RSS feed. Would it be possible to publish a meta-RSS feed that pulls in posts from the support forums for *all* of a developer's plugins (i.e. so that an author can have one RSS feed to monitor, rather than several)?

5) Pluggable plugins: redesign UI better to incorporate plugins that plug other plugins (e.g. Twitter Tools plugins, Simple Facebook Connect plugins, BuddyPress plugins).

I'm sure I can come up with more later.

[Ipstenu]

By #5, I keep thinking of them as 'Child Plugins' ...

The design of wp doesn't bother me, but then I'm kind of used to it. I rarely surf through extend for plugins, since the 'organization' is at the whimsy of the developer, and they don't always pick ones I'd use. It's something that I'd consider removing the 'weight' for the user-defined keywords and mandating use of a WP maintained list of approved categories. Of course, retrofitting the listings for 10k+ plugins is the sort of task I go find an intern for, and WP doesn't really have that luxury ;)

[chipbennett]

By #5, I keep thinking of them as 'Child Plugins' ...

The design of wp doesn't bother me, but then I'm kind of used to it. I rarely surf through extend for plugins, since the 'organization' is at the whimsy of the developer, and they don't always pick ones I'd use. It's something that I'd consider removing the 'weight' for the user-defined keywords and mandating use of a WP maintained list of approved categories. Of course, retrofitting the listings for 10k+ plugins is the sort of task I go find an intern for, and WP doesn't really have that luxury ;)

Why not have a GSoC project to write a script to parse plugin descriptions, and apply categories accordingly? :)

[Ipstenu]

It's still the sort of thing that needs a bit of manual intervention. I'm all for scripting, but at the end of the day, the computer lacks the ability to go "Hey, wait, Twitterness isn't an analytics plugin." While many plugin devs try to be really direct and upfront about what their plugin is, some people seed theirs will as many buzzwords as possible.

[JohnM]

WP has almost twice as many plugins as Joomla, but maybe its possible to lern from Joomlas organisation:

# Access & Security »
# Administration »
# Ads & Affiliates »
# Bridges »
# Calendars & Events »
# Clients »
# Communication »
# Communities & Groupware »
# Contacts & Feedback »
# Content Sharing »
# Core Enhancements »
# Directory & Documentation »
# e-Commerce »
# Editing »
# Extension Specific »
# External Contents »
# Financial »
# Hosting & Servers »
# Languages »
# Migration & Conversion »
# Miscellaneous »
# Multimedia »
# News Display »
# News Production »
# Photos & Images »
# Search & Indexing »
# Site Management »
# Social Web »
# Sports & Games »
# Structure & Navigation »
# Style & Design »
# Tools »
# Vertical Markets »

Full category list: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions

[JohnM]

Drupal has about 5000 extensions organized in the following categories:

* Utility (1046)
* Content (983)
* Content display (919)
* Third-party integration (898)
* Administration (601)
* Content Construction Kit (CCK) (460)
* Developer (451)
* Community (375)
* Media (360)
* e-Commerce (346)
* Views (334)
* User access/authentication (325)
* User management (286)
* JavaScript utilities (278)
* Theme related (278)
* Filters/editors (263)
* Taxonomy (253)
* Mail (212)
* Commerce/advertising (206)
* Site navigation (176)
* Import/export (173)
* File management (164)
* Search (161)
* Evaluation/rating (130)
* Syndication (130)
* Security (126)
* Organic groups (OG) (119)
* Statistics (106)
* Location (101)
* Multilingual (91)
* Event (83)
* Performance and scalability (82)
* Games and amusements (59)
* RDF (48)
* Drush (44)
* Rules (32)
* Paging (29)
* Mobile (22)
* Path management (21)
* Spam prevention (18)
* Features integration (7)