10 Things I Hope WordPress Adds to the Core

I absolutely LOVE WordPress blogging software. If you are a blogger, or thinking about blogging, I  highly recommend you go and download the free version of WordPress and use that for your blog. I have used it for over 3 years now on various blogs, and I love it. And the best part is the price: FREE. I mean, seriously, it beats any paid software I have ever used in website design!

Not only does the software work great, but it is SEO friendly, has a team of dedicated individuals constantly working on it, and there are thousands of plugins to add your favorite widgets.

That being said, there are things I wish WordPress.org would include in a future release. Here are my top 10 things I hope WordPress.org will include in core files (no plugins required).

10 Things WordPress Should Add to Their Core Files

1. A Contact Form–I am a bit surprised WordPress does not have a built in “contact” functionality. Sure, you can create a page and use a simple comment form, but that doesn’t work too well if you try to automatically turn comments off after XX days.  I know there are countless plugins for this as well, but I personally dislike adding too many plugins, for the simple fact that developers often abandon the project at some point, and you are left with a half-working plugin once you upgrade. So I would really enjoy a built-in/stable contact ability that is separate from comments.
2. Google Analytics Support–With so many bloggers using Google Analytics, I would love to see WordPress support this out of the box. Yoast has a great plugin for this, but again, why not just make this a standard feature?
3. More Standard Themes–Since WordPress is so great at offering a script that Google’s crawler seems to love, I wish they would add more themes to the standard files. They have offered the same old core themes release after release. If they offered just 3-5 main designs, then every blogger could customize it by altering colors, pictures, etc. to make it their own.
4. Standard Sitemaps Support–I would love to see sitemaps (both XML and HTML) being created on your wordpress install straight from the box. There are some great plugins (especially for the XML), but I would feel much more comfortable if WordPress added this feature to the core.
5. Better Navigation Options–On the home page of most wordpress blogs, there is usually a link at the bottom that says, “older entries—>.”  I would love to see some numerical buttons or other ways to add a more prominent and user-friendly design, to make browsing pages on a blog easier. Again, there are plugins, but plugins are an annoyance in most cases.
6. Auto-Backups–Another feature I would love to see is an automatic backup feature, that regularly backs up your blog at certain time intervals (or after any new posts). Again, plugins are there for this, but at this point I think WordPress should go ahead and offer this as a core feature.
7. Easier Link Building (Internally)–I wish there was some feature with WordPress to automatically find keywords or phrases in your blog and link them to other articles within your blog. This is by far one of my greatest annoyances in internal link building. I usually go to Google to find my own previously written articles so I can get the URL for cross-linking. It is very hard to sift through all of your posts within the WordPress install to find the URL. So I really wish they could create a way to find URL’s quickly, or even better, develop an auto-linking system so you can garnish better SEO benefits without having to do this manually (and it would also increase page views).
8. Theme Customization (Like Widgets)–I love how you can go to your “widgets” section and drag and drop the features you want to install on your sidebar. I wish the actual core files had a similar “widget” functionality. For example, you if you want to choose between a few different headers or footers, you can drag and drop the one you want on your theme. Or if you want to alter things like text color, text size, link colors, etc., you could do this with a drag and drop (or radio buttons), as opposed to editing the core stylesheet files directly. This would also be great for changing Ad layouts!
9. Single Post Templates–Wordpress has a “page template” feature that allows you to add different templates for different pages. Unfortunately, they do not yet have this functionality for individual posts. This is important for many bloggers since they join sponsored review sites, and may need an alternate template for certain posts (to avoid ads from displaying, etc.).
10. Better Spam Protection–Okay, spam will always probably exist in some form, but I think there is always room for improvement. I think they should over basic spam protection scripts out of the box, with things like captcha for comments/contact forms, and more.