Digging Into WordPress has an interesting poll online asking the question, Should the Hello Dolly plugin be included with WordPress? I won’t divulge the numbers but I can say that the majority of people who have voted for the poll say No, it should be removed.

Honestly, Hello Dolly doesn’t bother me much at all. The reason it’s bundled with WordPress is to give new plugin authors the ability to dive through an established plugin to figure out how the plugin system works and for developing their own. Hello Dolly doesn’t slow anything down. I know many people simply delete the plugin after installing WordPress, especially those who install WordPress for their clients. If Hello Dolly sticks around, it won’t bother me. If it is retired to the plugin repository, it won’t bother me. Thankfully though, there are different methods for installing WordPress that are coming around which actually provide the option not to install Hello Dolly upon initial installation.