We’re pretty close to the impending release of WordPress 3.1 and I do feel sorry for the stress that Matt, Jane and the whole WordPress team have been through for this release cycle! If you’ve been reading the emails on the WordPress Hackers mailing list and looking through the comments on Trac you would’ve know that there have been loads of people who have been hassling the team for new features and bug fixes but not enough people have been helping to contribute. (FYI: Check out this great post on contributing to WordPress on wpcandy.com). Lucky, Andrew Nacin has been a bit of a freak for this release and he’s worked incredibly hard on this release!
Anyways, putting that aside, I’m gonna put my nuts on the line with a few predictions for WordPress related things in January!
The obvious one!
Well we all know that WordPress 3.1 is gonna ship soon. I’m excited about it. I can’t wait to roll it out on our clients WordPress sites, my WordPress sites and friends WordPress sites. It’s got some fantastic new features and I won’t bang on about it cause you can read about the new features all over the interwebs!
Odds of this happening: 100%
A new default theme!
I’m throwing this one out there and I’m sure I’ll be wrong but I think Twenty Ten is gonna still ship with 3.1 but I have a feeling that we might be lucky enough to get a new theme and I think this theme is gonna be based off this Toolbox by Ian Stewart.
Sure that theme looks boring right? Well yeah but it’s a framework theme that you can build on. Not only that it uses HTML5 and CSS3 so that means so you can easily sex it up.
Check out http://toolboxdemo.wordpress.com/ to see what I’m backing for our new WordPress 3.1 theme. We’ll still have Twenty Ten shipped of course but it’ll be the Kubrick of 2011.
Odds of this happening: 42% (I’m just making this up but I have my fingers crossed!)
bbPress as a standalone plugin!
Oh yeah! That’s right! I’ve said it! 
Matt‘s been wanting it to happen for ages and I really think now is the time.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with bbPress it essentially turns WordPress into a forum. The trouble with bbPress is that it’s never been a standalone WordPress plugin. It’s integrated beautifully into BuddyPress but if you’ve ever had a site of a client or a site of your own and have wanted to add bbPress a forum then it has been difficult to integrate.
I pulled down the latest branch of bbPress from Trac and installed it alongside the bleeding edge nightly of WordPress 3.1 and things suddenly got exciting!
Check out bbPress as a plugin below:
Odds of this happening: 83.465%
Fingers crossed
So seeing quite a few of the WordPress team are off to Jane’s neck of the woods for #wptybee then it’s pretty safe to say it’ll only be a matter of days/hours/minutes til WordPress 3.1 is released so let’s see what’s in store!
What are your thoughts and predictions guys and gals?
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There must be some way to clean up the huge list of menu items on the left side of the admin area these days. Any word of that coming up?
Well it depends on how you have it set up in terms of user roles. If you have an Editor role then a lot of the items on the menu don’t show up. If you’re an Admin you see everything like in the screenshots above.
I’m admin to a lot of WP sites. :
That’s why then! If you just had an Editor role then you’d see a very clean dashboard! The admin role is setup for the developers normally and most users should get an Editor role to keep things clutter free and easy to use.
Yeah but I need my admin status because I set these sites up for clients. I
just think the panels are getting out of control.
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