The work on WordPress 3.4 Alpha is already in development and will probably see the light of day sometime in 2012. I’ve created a list of some of the features/improvements I would love to see in this new version.

Better Media management

Today, all images(or other media) are posts, which basically means that if you want an contributor to be able to upload and edit images, she will also be able to create and edit posts. Further more, there are no way to categorize and sorting your media to make it easier to reuse your images rather than uploading new every time.

Also, the gallery could be improved. Why not let us decide what images that should be in the gallery or not? Multiple galleries per page would also be nice.

Easier Custom Meta Boxes for the Custom Fields

To add custom meta boxes today can be intimidating for an developer just getting started with WordPress. It’s actually pretty weird that the custom fields section of WordPress hasn’t been improved more over the years, and is still just a hidden meta box with a rather bad user experience.

Hopefully they can take a look how it’s done i Drupal, where you can add custom types of meta boxes like checkboxes and select boxes without writing a line of code.

Faster loading times

WordPress is many thing, but fast is not one of them. If I could pick one improvment for WordPress 3.4, this would be it. WordPress 3.3 was actually slower than WordPress 3.2, and some improvements in this area would be very welcome.

Long shots

Here’s a small list of features that would be cool, but that’s probably not going to happened.

Mobile themes

The mobile web is growing bigger and bigger. How cool wouldn’t it be to be able to have two themes, one standard and one for devices? The idea is that you pick one of each in the themes page in WordPress, and then WordPress automatically detects what device the user are using, and shows the correct theme.

Front-end drag n’ drop admin

This one would make it so much simpler for clients to understand what their doing. Simple click on what you want to edit, and just drag it where you want it. I think PageLine has done something like this, and might be worth to check out!

Dynamic sidebars

I think it would be nice to be able to create sidebars inside WordPress admin, so every page can have it’s own sidebar. Then you can choose what sidebar the page/post should use just like you choose what template you want to use.

What do you want?

These are just my wishes. What would you like to see in the next version of WordPress?