I realise that’s at a bit of a tangent to your original question Jeff, but thought it was a good place to bring it up.

@Ryan – I remember reading somewhere that plugins stay plugins because they’re not deemed necessary for everyone’s WP site to run, like the example of a gallery plugin, and instead the core is a base to be extended. The core cannot be designed to serve everyone’s different needs, hence why its core. So in my eyes, it’s best to leave this sort of stuff as a plugin. If I need it, I’ll download it.

Yeah, i had a complete guess :P

@JLeuze – Yeah, that was more in line with what I thought the term meant but I think in this case, it’s for third party plugins not necessarily plugins maintained by the core devs.

@Darren Hoyt – I think it would be easy to figure out what those plugins are with the data the WordPress API collects from plugins installed on all of the self hosted WordPress installs.

@Ron – Your comment actually answers Conorps suggestion of what Canonical.php is for. Don’t think aliases has anything to do with these plugins.

@Martin – Yeah, sounds good but I don’t like the idea of extending the workload of the core developers by having to maintain these types of plugins.

@westi – Well then, that explains it and what I was looking for. Now it makes sense.

If it is a question between including something in the core, or bundling a plugin, I saw stick it in the core. I don’t see much point in having something as a plugin when it’s bundled in anyway. If a bundled plugin is broken, then the core is broken since the plugin is effectively part of the core anyway (if it is bundled) … I’m not sure that entirely makes sense, but hopefully you can decipher my gibberish.

My point is … if you are going to bundle them as plugins, they may as well be in core anyway. Although I’m still not sure that is the question they’re asking.

These plugins would be tested alongside new WordPress releases to ensure that they are compatible.

This allows for new chunks of functionality to be developed that are wanted by a section of the community without impacting the users who don’t want this functionality.

It will also allow for those plugins to be updated on a different release cycle if required.

Don’t need that certain feature? Don’t enable the included plugin.

My take of the question is, “How do you feel about extending/adding to the rewrite rules/system to cover additional media types and/or adding them to the core?”