Social Sharing Options

Another aspect of WordPress admin issues is the widget controls. Although the current drag-and-drop widget control is simple, it is again not WYSIWIG and doesn’t help control above-the-fold design. Accordingly, a Widget Area Chooser is in the works to help. Perhaps you’ve had issues trying to find (within the WordPress back-end) which tools or plug-ins on what aspect of your site you are using or want to use. OmniSearch is a new plug-in being developed to give global admin search capabilities to solve and search all. And finally, yes—a new dashboard UI is in the works overall for WordPress with the WP-Dash plug-in. Just by nature of these issues (and the progresses described here) the WordPress IA must continue to be enhanced over time for usability. (For more on these and other future works for WordPress, see www.elegantthemes.com/blog/general-news/what-you-can-expect-from-future-versions-of-wordpress.)

Another issue for WordPress designers is the desire to customize plug-in features. Don’t like the field restrictions on your WordPress contact form? Want more control over the image placement in your WordPress art gallery? You don’t want to have to build your own plug-in from scratch, so there are WordPress plug-in platforms being developed to allow us all to achieve greater customization for the plug-in functionality we want. This kind of design flexibility and convenience for WordPress’s 23% chunk of the web’s sites only makes sense. (For more on plug-in platforms, see Also consider progressions like WordPress automatic updates and more frequent minor updates (in contrast to those flags within your WordPress dashboard you’ve seen in the past asking you to update your WordPress version). And perhaps you’ve noticed the mess of code written within WordPress site themes by the myriad theme developers out there? The lack of consistency, certain CSS style elements appearing here or there and with mixed up tags, and so on? WordPress is working on inline documentation coding standards to help! Because we should have guidelines to follow on how the code should be written and placed—issues to help us all. Or perhaps you’re waiting on the next WordPress default theme? We’ve seen Twenty-Ten, Twenty-Eleven themes, and more—up to Twenty-Fourteen—a responsive, magazine-style media showcase theme. I’ve talked about efforts to improve the WordPress UI and make it more WYSIWIG; more specifically, WordPress is building secure, inline editing from the front face of your blog. (For more info on these enhancements, see http://thewebatom.net/blog/wordpress-future/.)

If you’re not aware of WordPress multi-sites, it’s a growing possibility. This WordPress asset allows many WordPress sites to be architected and tied to same admin platforms. This has allowed some website pro viders to target similar users or clients within a specific market with like WordPress website themes and architecture. For example, in the restaurant industry, there are two such providers: happytables.com and restaurantengine.com. Although such models built and targeted for specific markets are not a new concept, advances with WordPress multi-sites empower more and more of these for the future. And if it’s not multi-site specifically that offers the advanced functionality you want, there is a growing trend of developers building off of WordPress’s available application framework to develop whatever application functionality they can dream up.