New year, new you — right? In a time of new year’s resolutions, we’ll keep up our annual trend of creating some resolutions we wish WordPress would make. You can read our wish list for 2020 here to see how are hopes and dreams for WordPress have changed over the past year.
1. Content update scheduling
This feature topped our WordPress wish list in 2019 and appeared on the list last year as well. Currently, new content can be scheduled to go live at a certain time. We make use of this feature every week, as we schedule our WordPress tips to go live on Monday mornings. Why, then, can’t we schedule updates to existing content in the same way? It’s a no-brainer that would be useful for many things:
- Changing the text of an article to match the current season or year
- A page about a temporary sale or deal that won’t be around forever
- Simple text updates to keep a page updated (“this year” vs. “last year,” etc.)
Since WordPress already has content scheduling, it wouldn’t be difficult to add update scheduling as well. For now, we’ll keep hoping WordPress developers take notice and add what would be an extremely important feature!
2. Better built-in security
Over the past few years, WordPress has taken great strides to try to help its users keep their websites up and running. They’ve made improvements to solve issues with the so-called “white screen of death” when a site won’t load. They added timeouts to maintenance mode so a site won’t get stuck if an update fails. They’ve even added automatic updates to WordPress core, themes, and plugins. However, WordPress could still take more strides to keep their sites safe from hacking.
Many great security plugins exist — WordFence and iThemes Security are two of the best. But with security being such a major issue, WordPress would be wise not to leave things to a third-party plugin. Jetpack, created by the same company as WooCommerce and WordPress.com, also offers some security features, but it’s still an extra plugin that must be installed separately. As we’ve mentioned last year, we’d like to see WordPress incorporate some Jetpack features into WordPress core (and we’ll discuss this again in a minute).
3. Built-in website stats
Another feature built into Jetpack that really needs to make its way into WordPress core is website stats. Originally, Jetpack served to provide features from WordPress.com that weren’t built into self-hosted WordPress sites. But why not eventually migrate them into WordPress core after all this time? Most every website owner is interested in tracking traffic data, so it only makes sense to make WordPress automatically track stats instead of requiring a third-party plugin.
4. Multilingual site support
Matt Mullenweg’s 2019 “State of the Word” address outlined the future of WordPress and the Gutenberg project. One of the final steps he mentioned was support for multilingual sites. Many WordPress websites would benefit from being available in multiple languages, so we excitedly await the day when the Gutenberg project is complete and WordPress websites support multiple languages out of the box.
5. Better dark mode support
This feature falls lower on our list this year because WordPress has made strides toward supporting dark mode. However, WordPress does not yet support dark mode to its fullest potential, so this remains on our list for yet another year. Ideally, WordPress would offer separate light mode and dark mode color pickers for each element in the Customizer. It’s even possible to serve separate images for light mode and dark mode, so we’d love to see WordPress eventually support light and dark mode images as well. For now, however, theme color selections built into WordPress core are a very important first step. We’d love to see the WordPress Dashboard support Dark Mode for nighttime content creators as well.
What features do you think WordPress is missing? Let us know in the comments!
