In what has become an annual tradition for MPWR Design, we’re kicking off the new year with some new year’s resolutions we wish WordPress would make. You can compare this year’s list with our previous wish lists for 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 to see how our ideas for the WordPress platform have changed over the years. With that in mind, here are what we consider to be the most notable features missing from WordPress or things we would like to see change:
1. Harmony among the WordPress community
2024 was a very odd year for WordPress, and for the oddest of reasons. It’s not because developers made poor decisions for the future of the platform or WordPress was riddled with bugs or security issues. By far, the biggest issue WordPress had last year had nothing to do with WordPress itself.
Instead, WordPress received some valid criticism because its founder Matt Mullenweg started a public conflict with the hosting company WP Engine. For example, Inc Magazine ran an article on Mullenweg that he called a “hit piece.” While Mullenweg complained of the article’s negative tone, most of the critiques he has received in that article and elsewhere are mostly of his making. To summarize the battle taking place:
- Mullenweg complained that WP Engine tricks people into thinking they are officially associated with or owned by WordPress because of the use of the initials “WP” in their branding. One of the primary reasons he stated for doing so was that WP Engine was making billions of dollars off WordPress without contributing to the community. According to Mullenweg, WP Engine is also the only hosting company that turns revisions off by default.
- WP Engine sent Mullenweg’s company, Automattic, and cease and desist letter and accused Automattic of demanding large sums of money to avoid Mullenweg “going nuclear” against the company. In the letter, they argued that their use of the WordPress trademark was covered under fair use.
- Automattic responded with a cease and desist letter of their own and the WordPress Foundation changed their copyright policy to include a request to avoid use of the abbreviation “WP” as it “confuses people.”
- WP Engine filed suit against Mullenweg and Automattic, citing “abuse of power, extortion, and greed” and stating that the promises WordPress made of keeping the platform open source were not kept.
- Mullenweg then banned WP Engine from accessing WordPress.org — meaning WP Engine sites would not receive theme and plugin updates automatically, among other things — and forked a popular plugin WP Engine maintains, arguing that the WP Engine-maintained version of the plugin was not secure.
It’s a tricky situation. Both sides make valid claims. Mullenweg’s assertion that offering WordPress without revisions is “strip-mining the WordPress ecosystem, giving our users a crappier experience so they can make more money.” This is a valid point, as the only reason for WP Engine not to offer revisions is to save on server resources, allowing them to operate more affordably at the expense of an important feature for users. However, Mullenweg’s attacks on WP Engine are concerning to the WordPress community. How can companies like ours know for sure that Mullenweg won’t one day change course again and create conflict across the community?
Many WordPress users and developers have called for Mullenweg to either resign or be forcibly removed from the WordPress Foundation. Others are concerned that Mullenweg is operating out of a conflict of interest, as he also makes billions of dollars off WordPress through his company Automattic, which is itself firmly entrenched in the WordPress Foundation. Will Mullenweg expect every company that finds success using WordPress contribute financially or through contributions to the platform? It’s a dangerous precedent, and we can only hope the disastrous conflict is resolved quickly.
2. Update scheduling
On to discussing WordPress itself, we still have several things we’d like to see WordPress change. We mentioned this feature in 2023 and 2024, but it bears repeating once again. WordPress allows users to schedule content to go live, but you can’t schedule updates. Scheduling content is a powerful feature WordPress has had for years, enabling us to schedule our WordPress tips (like this one) to go live at a specific time. This way, they’re available before our first scheduled social media posts go live, and we don’t actually have to wait until Mondays to post content. There are plenty of reasons you might want to schedule changes to content too, whether it’s limited-time content (articles of the month, for example) or simply keeping an article up to date when information is set to change. We use the PublishPress Revisions plugin, but the user experience is anything but smooth. Surely WordPress could do a better job implementing this feature, and it’s one they should strongly consider.
3. Dark mode support
In our 2023 list, we said, “It would be lazy to copy and paste from last year’s WordPress wish list, but it’s also starting to seem pretty lazy that WordPress still doesn’t have better support for dark mode.” Yet here we are in 2025 and nothing has changed.
WordPress is an amazing platform for building a website, and there are many reasons we use it and recommend it. However, the way WordPress has handled dark mode is nothing short of embarrassing. WordPress core developers believe the best way to support dark mode is for individual themes to figure how to support it on their own, but that’s a terrible excuse, and it’s simply not true. The entire point of WordPress is to provide a common codebase for all themes and plugins so developers don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but they have failed in respect to dark mode.
As we have stated before, proper dark mode support requires three components:
- Dark mode options should be integrated into the Customizer so users can easily add a dark mode and light mode color for each element.
- WordPress needs to add dark mode alternatives to images — i.e. show image A in light mode and show image B in dark mode.
- WordPress needs to add dark mode support to the Dashboard so site admins can edit in dark mode.
These three components of dark mode all make much more sense to integrate into core rather than leaving the work to theme developers. Themes would have to determine which elements need to have colors selected as they do now, but the mechanism to do so would be much better integrated into core. We’ve actually made suggestions directly to the WordPress team on this issue, but sadly, the WordPress development team held strong to their position that theme developers should figure out a way to integrate dark mode on their own. We can only hope the WordPress team corrects course at some point.
What features do you want to see WordPress add? Let us know in the comments!
