What You Won’t See in WordPress 2.5

One of the WordPress lead developers, Ryan Boren, announced today that WordPress 2.5 was going into “feature-freeze.” That means that the remaining month until 2.5’s March 10 release will be spent fixing the bugs in existing 2.5 features, not adding more.

And that’s a lot of bugs, as much of the admin redesign hasn’t yet been completed by lead developer Matt Mullenweg, who is single-handedly doing the styling redesign.

Because of the feature-freeze, here are some features you won’t be seeing in WordPress 2.5:

• A general meta-data table, my proposal for providing a better way to deal with things like comment meta data and plugin info.
• Localized plugin metadata. Currently, plugins’ descriptions, names, etc., cannot be translated to the user’s language. The problem doesn’t have a trivial solution, so it was pushed off for the future.
• Automatic WordPress upgrades. The idea is for users to click a button in the WordPress dashboard and upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. Although this didn’t make it in, automatic upgrades for themes and plugins is in 2.5 for now, with the possibility of being yanked out should it prove too buggy.
• Ajaxy page rearranging. This was actually one of the 2007 WordPress Google Summer of Code projects, but like all (as far as I know) of the other SoC projects has not been implemented.
• Word count. This seems to me like something that should be restricted to a plugin, but as it’s part of WordPress.com and was proposed by a core developer, it seemed destined to become a feature.
• User roles overhaul. User capabilities have a number of problems (for example, you can’t easily sort a massive database of users by role). So far the proposed workarounds have their own problems.
• Plugin uninstall hook. There are plugin activation and deactivation events, but no plugin uninstallation events. The idea, pushed recently by Jeffro2pt0 on WeblogToolsCollection, is something that would clear out the unused data left around by unused plugins (depending on the plugin. This can be extensive, from numerous options values—slowing down unrelated queries—to entire database tables.