The last I heard about the ideas section of WordPress was that Jane Wells was cleaning up the place to prepare it for an upgrade to bbPress 1.0.  Not sure how the progress is going but upon checking my feedreader this morning, I noticed some ideas starting to trickle in. Here is a small sampling.

Enhanced Author Widget – I wish there was a plugin to add am Author widget to the Widget section with options to display the avatar, to display a list of the posts (possibly with thumbnails generated from the articles next them), links to author’s pages on social networking sites, etc.

Offer Usage Stats To Plugin Authors – We can see how many downloads our plugins have, and from comments Matt M. has made we know there are stats on how many blogs a plugin is active on. It would be nice to make that available to the plugin author (maybe on the admin page where the SVN info, etc is). No personal information, just a simple “Installed/Active in ## sites”

I’ve talked with many plugin authors and plenty of them tell me this sort of information would be great to have. If you’re a plugin author and like this idea, I say go on over and voice your feedback, perhaps even include some information you’d like to see in the stats page.

Conditional Tags For ‘if pings’ or if trackbacks. - But now that we have the option to split comments and trackbacks up when displaying in our comments section, there is a small problem: there’s no conditional tag to say “if there’s trackbacks” or “if there’s pings” so we can keep the trackbacks list silent until there’s actually a trackback. The problem is that, with the new formulation, we end up with a non-XHTML-compliant ol or ul with no li in the middle.

While I don’t mind discussion of these ideas here, the discussion would be better placed on the actual ideas page. You can use your WordPress forum user account to login to the ideas forum.