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I don't want any extra pointless email, and I'm sure you don't either. My vision for the Post Status newsletter is for it to be a personal, periodic letter that's never a feed, self-promotional, or automatically generated in any way. I plan to deliver insight to the WordPress community, or perhaps dig into specific topics of WordPress news, development, design, user experience, or other issues that face WordPress users or professionals.

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Now, let's talk about WordPress.

WordPress is an evolving platformThis is an important time for WordPress as a platform. As we near the 10th birthday of WordPress, we can see that it's still evolving and maturing. And different people have different ideas as to what's best for the future. Around WordPress' 9th birthday, Matt Mullenweg noted that WordPress was entering its fourth pivot of its lifetime, as an app platform. In the same talk, he discussed how he'd like to see it radically simplified.

It's very important for simplification to be a key component of the future of WordPress. WordPress needs to be dead simple to use. Think how simple it is to start and use a Pinterest or Twitter account. Yet in order to maintain its dominance as a CMS, it also needs to continue to be powerful, and maintain flexibility. In my opinion, what will guarantee another ten years of success for WordPress is if it can continue to become more powerful for handling a variety of applications and types of data, and simultaneously gets simpler to use.

I don't know exactly how to make it simplerI've written about the need for a simpler admin before, but really that's just the beginning.  In that article, I wrote mostly about currently available tools for making the admin easier to use by reducing clutter and showing users how to find help. But we need to go much further than help boxes and video tutorials. The admin needs to be considerably simpler for the average user.

Unfortunately, I don't have any brilliant ideas on how to make WordPress super simple. It's certainly going to be difficult, and a lot of tough decisions will have to be made I'm sure. But hey, I'm optimistic. WordPress gained much of its initial traction because it was just so simple. But that simplicity is compared to the competition of the time. And now, many new publishing platforms are coming out with simplicity at the forefront.

Tumblr, Svbtle and Medium are all hosted platforms that are quite simple, even if they aren't direct WordPress competitors. In the self-hosted space, I'm excited by what I've seen in Leaflets demos, and inspired by the outside-the-box thinking from Ghost. There's also a ton of buzz around static site generators, although these are only "simple" for people that like to hack around in the first place.

BrainstormingThe WordPress 3.6 development cycle has had plenty of debate about flatter admin icons, until the idea was shelved. But I'd like to see more than a new skin. I'd love to see a more complete theming engine for the admin. Currently, theming the admin is pretty painful. 

I'd also like for things to be more modular, so that it'd be easier to "turn off" parts of WordPress that are unnecessary. Not everyone needs pages, comments, categories, tags, etc, etc. But WordPress enables quite a bit by default. I like that it's easy to get a lot of functionality with WordPress in a short amount of time, but I think I'd like WordPress to assume less at the very beginning. I recently heard an interesting interview with Ryan Irelan, the technical director at Happy Cog, where he describes Expression Engine's unassuming nature and why he likes it.

Also, one area where I think more power could help developers make WordPress simpler is with metaboxes. Currently, metaboxes are a pretty big pain in the butt without a good class or plugin to work from. Some purists would call me a fool for that statement, but they can't deny that most developers have a hard time creating rich, intuitive post admin interfaces without a helper class or plugin. I build clients sites every day, and I constantly create interfaces with metaboxes that have radio buttons, select boxes, list fields, multiple WYSIWYGs, complex post and taxonomy relationships, and more. And doing so takes time to get it right. Having a more thorough API within WordPress core would be enormously helpful for making simpler client interfaces. And developers would be less likely to ask users to use existing post areas in unintuitive ways. Developers could label and define an input the way that makes the most sense for the user, and WordPress would be simpler to use as a result.

I'm optimisticWordPress is a tremendous platform, with hundreds and hundreds of contributors and millions of users. I think the UI team generally does a great job of identifying problems and proposing solutions. WordPress really shined in the 3.5 cycle with the media manager changes. A task that was so daunting for years turned out to be an incredibly successful release feature. I just had a client last week praising how much easier it is to use.

And with the talented people in this community, I think we can continue to improve WordPress so that our clients and users in general are praising new features for years to come. In fact, I've staked my entire career on it.