I got curious today wondering what we could look forward to in the next major upgrade. I read somewhere that the developer’s main objective would be to enhance the Dashboard interface, but I can’t seem to find any further information on what that might include.

In general most of the upgrades in the past have reflected user’s suggestions from WordPress ideas forum. If this holds true these are some of the features we can look forward to.

Easy Upgrade

Many users are asking for an automatic upgrade script within the Dashboard that would allow WordPress to retrieve the necessary files and replace the old ones.

The routines that would need to be written would take a great deal of work. First would be to backup the files to be replaced, make sure that the files to be replaced had the permissions set correctly.

The next step would be to make sure the plugins were compatible or at least upgradeable. This part would be near imposable due to the fact that not all plugins are listed with the plugins codex.

The next step would be to deactivate all the plugins an upgrade the ones that need upgrading. Then finally the files could be copied over from the WordPress website. Then the normal upgrade procedure could take over, leaving only the plugins to be reactivated.

In short this would be a major effort; one I’m guessing would be a bit too much. I would venture to think they would first just do a plugin upgrade, and leave a full upgrade for a future release.

Image resizing

This one is kind of a no brainier; WordPress certainly does not excel in this function. I use a plugin for one of my other blogs called Flickr Photo Album, It has a very cool feature that allows you to pick the image size using DHTML.

This plugin doesn’t actually change the file; it just gets the resized image from Flickr. But the popup menu interface is very easy to use.

PHP’s GD module could easily be used to make the changes to the images, however not all host have it installed. I do hope that this will be in the next major upgrade.

Improved searching capabilities

I didn’t even know this but WordPress’s search only search within post. Users are eager for to see it search post, static pages and comments.

Now I have no way of knowing what will really be in the next upgrade, it’s pure speculation on my part, but it seems pretty logical to me.