What WordPress plugin would you like to see made?

[carlhancock]

I'm not talking something simple, or something that adds some minor functionality.

What functionality would you like to see made into a WordPress plugin? Something larger, along the lines of the form builder and lead management plugin that we are currently developing.

Is there any big functionality you would want to see made part of WordPress?

Think outside the box here... think about some of the web apps you use (Basecamp? Highrise?) and how similar functionality could be made into a plugin.

Or think about an existing plugin that adds a lot of functionality... but just flat out sucks in implementation (NextGen Gallery anyone?).

We would love to hear what people want, as we want to make it happen.

Carl

[Martin]

I can only think of one plugin that I would want... Probably would be classed "simple".

I would like to see better implementation of Gravatar in WordPress blogs. For example a plugin that allows people to create a Gravatar account from within a comment form. A plugin like this would be very popular and would get more people jumping on the Gravatar bandwagon.

[dancole]

How about a bbPress plugin? That software is starting to take off and it's a good time to enter that market. Plus there are a lot of areas that still need to be improved.

[Ryan]

@Martin - I'd wondered if that was possible recently. I hadn't thought of it being useful for WordPress, but definitely for bbPress as it would allow users to upload their own gravatar from directly within the bbPress site. Perhaps it could be done with an iframe somehow?

[andrea_r]

Feel free to check out wpmu and add or improve any of the sitewide plugins. :)

Lots of existing plugins for WP will need to be tweaked when the merge happens. And some will be able to have added features because of multiple blogs.

E-commerce for example: tons of people want multiple shops, and even the ability for the site owner to get a commission from the shops or charge.

Or (even better) the ability to add a ton of fields to the signup page. Nobody's doing that well.

[Otto]

The gravatar thing could be done via javascript. The problem is how to detect when somebody doesn't have an avatar right after they type in their email address. You'd need to use some javascript to calculate the md5 hash for the email after they type it, then perform a hit to this URL:

http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/MD5_H...-RECOGNIZE.com

If the hash doesn't match an existing gravatar, then the gravatar server sends back a temporary redirect to your default URL. If you can recognize that redirect and act on it instead of redirecting, then you can do anything you like at that point.

[Ryan]

@Otto - Interesting idea, I was thinking of something simpler by having a link saying 'get a gravatar' or similar. When the link was clicked a lightbox would pop open which iframed the gravatar site. Checking for one dynamically would be far cooler though.

[itsananderson]

Doing what Otto suggests directly via JavaScript would be a bit challenging though, because browsers stop AJAX requests to across domains (to avoid XSS attacks). It wouldn't be terribly hard to accomplish with a simple PHP proxy page though.

[Ryan]

Hmm, the interesting piece of information for a project I've been working on. I was intending to use Ajax across domains for it, I guess that isn't an option then :( Or at least not without a "PHP proxy" and I don't even know what that is :( Damn, this lack of programming skill!

[Jeffro]

Not sure how extensive you could make this but I wouldn't mind seeing a plugin that provided granularity for exporting data. I'd like to export data from categories, or from tags, or any number of variations that the WXR export format provides. Just use the WXR as a base but extend that to include all sorts of functionality.