Better Post Management

Man, does Manage –> Posts suck or what? You’ve got a search box [which is nice], and a month-by-month listing, and … that’s it. This is disappointing! I was hoping WP2.0 would bring some love to the Manage Posts page, but unfortunately, it didn’t.

How could this be better?

1. Filtering by categories. If you’re like me, you stick posts you imported into their own category, then filter away as you have time. There’s no way to do filter by category with WP out-of-the-box.
2. Filtering by authors. Not all WP installs are single-author Weblogs! Perversely, you can filter by author by going to Users –> Authors & Users and clicking on the post count of any user, but … that’s convoluted.
3. Filtering by most-recently-commented. If someone dredges up an old post and gives you some feedback on it—feedback you have to act on—you have to hope that you have email notification running or are grabbing your comment feed, because that’s the only way you’re going to be able to start digging up the entry.

Got some other ideas about how Manage –> Posts could work better? Leave a comment.

Why No Atom 1.0 in WP 2.0?

From Phil Ringnalda, I learn that Ben de Groot has been working to see if Atom 1.0 support will come out in WP 2.0. Apparently, WP 2.0 won’t support Atom 1.0, and as Sam Ruby promised he would, the feed validator will now declare Atom 0.3 feeds as invalid.

I think that we deserve an answer as to why WP 2.0 won’t get Atom 1.0 support out-of-the-box—I’m sure that there’s a good reason, but I’d like to know what that reason is.

Roles and Capabilities

The new roles and capabilities make a lot of sense, but I’m not sure I like the term “subscriber”. Subscribing comes with a lot of concepts. I probably would have just called it “user”. And yes, this is coming close to the ideal I have in mind for how a user system should work.

Standalone Links Manager

I think that most people who’ve used WordPress have a great affinity for the Links Manager—in fact, most of us would rather use it above all else. Me, I’m wishing that the WordPress development team would release it as a standalone piece of GPL’d code for use in non-WordPress sites. For my use, I’d implement it immediately on GFMorris.net to maintain that sidebar, which I do right now by hand. [All that is now is a hand-maintained, unordered list with a bunch of XFN data.]

Why do I advocate this?

1. Marketing. Not everyone is going to want to use WordPress for sites such as my GFMorris.net, but people will like having a good tool for this kind of thing. Since the Links Manager is best-of-breed in my opinion, it would become popular throughout the site design community as the tool to manage links—and while that’s a small niche, look into the toolset of any master chef, and you’ll find lots of great tools that do one thing and do it well. Don’t you think that the WP devs could stand that level of marketing?
2. Improving the Web. Providing good linking tools that make use of good metadata, as the Links Manager does, makes the Web better, because it lowers the barrier to making great links for content producers.