I’ve been pondering for a while what I would like to see in a major new version of Wordpress.

Yes there are the constant updates such as the upcoming Wordpress 3.6 but whilst these features are nice it does feel a little bit like painting the house but ignoring the big crack in the foundations.

1. Addition of a WP_THEME_DIR

This is to go along side WP_CONTENT_DIR and WP_PLUGIN_DIR so that the location of themes can be set without worrying about where the content and plugins are stored.

2. Relative URL’s in Core

I’d like to see all data stored in the database to use relative URL’s only, then when the content is sent to the page for rendering the absolute URL can be generated based upon the configuration stored in the database.

3. Better Password Security

In core should be the ability to enforce password restrictions based upon user role so that Administrators must comply with a higher level of security compared to standard users.

4. Support for running Administration section under different domain name (including HTTPS)

This will allow the frontend of the site to be under www.domain.com and the admin to be under cms.domain.com for example, this will make it easier to lock down Wordpress installs without having to buy a dedicated certificate for each site.

5. HyperDB moved into Core

Having master/slave and other complex setups supported in core along with standard setup will mean better stability going forward and embracing the management of larger Wordpress installs with less effort.

6. More advanced permissions

When dealing with multi-user sites the current permission structure is incredibly basic, it would be nice to be able to configure much finer grained permissions on a post type basis and also functionality basis.

7. Ban any plugins from ever writing to WP_PLUGIN_DIR

This is one of my pet hates, when a plugin allows image content or cache data to be written to itself, there could be a WP_LOG_DIR and WP_TEMP_DIR defines available that could be used for this purpose, but plugins can not always be written to (especially when dealing with larger multi-server sites).

8. Bultin SEO Best Practice

Having good SEO is critical to all websites so this functionality should be included as part of core. Using the Wordpress-SEO plugin as a good starter for 10.

That is all for now, (I don’t want much eh?). I think the addition of this functionality will make managing larger Wordpress installs much less painful and could open up Wordpress to an even wider market.