5 Sep

What Should We Work on Next?

Posted in Development by Michael Martin 8 Comments

Feedback from our customers is extremely important to me. Our two biggest developments in the past month, updates to Oracle and localization support, were both entirely down to suggestions from users.

If you have a minute, I’d love to get more feedback from you here. I’m going to be away for the next two weeks, but when I get back, it’s straight back to development work! And with that in mind, I want to know what features would you like me to work on first?

What Matters Most to You?

Style options panel – The current options panel covers the content of your site well. This would be a new page of options to do with adapting colors, fonts etc.
Better developer support – This would be to let you start building your own custom designs off Chameleon. It would cover tweaking our CSS further to be as simple as possible to skin, and adding in some new developer functions. And of course, create tutorials and help docs for it all!
Shortcodes – To give you better control over your post content, e.g. for inserting message boxes, pullquotes etc.
More Page Templates – e.g. a “blog” template that creates a traditional blog page, useful if your homepage is a magazine layout like Oracle or MyBiz)
Current Panel Improvements – This would involve looking at our option pages and trying to simplify them further, making things even easier for you to get used to.
Simpler way of adding plugins or custom code to themes (An alternative to using hooks).

Let me know which you’d most like to see by replying in the comments here. And of course, if you have an idea that’s not on the list, let me know and I’ll see what we can do!

Comments on “What Should We Work on Next?”

Lethe said:

Thanks for this post, well I’m a (fresh) user of Mybiz so I would love to see :

1 – More page templates to add flexibility to the theme itself

2 – More style options in the panel. Until lately I’ve been using another theme, contact me if you need a more “pratical” example, and what I loved about it was the easy to use and full options control panel… simply awesome, so I would love to see something similar added to your outstanding themes would make theme even more perfect

5th September 2010 Reply
- Michael Martin said:
  
  Thanks for taking the time to leave the feedback Lethe, I really appreciate it!
  
  - Page templates – Sure thing. There’s a huge amount we can do with them. Were there any ideas for templates in particular that you’d like to see though?
  
  - Style options – Glad to see a vote for them, I definitely want to add them in to give everyone much easier control over their site’s design!
  
  Thanks again for sharing your thoughts!
  
  6th September 2010 Reply
Kathy said:

My vote is for Style options panel – I think there are plenty of wordpress users that want to be able to customize their site without digging into the code and when a them offers that it’s a huge plus.

8th September 2010 Reply
- Michael Martin said:
  
  Thanks Kathy! Completely agree with you there
  
  24th September 2010 Reply
Bart said:

I have an idea that is not on the list – one click export/import of all the settings. It would make it easier to move from development to production server.

9th September 2010 Reply
- Michael Martin said:
  
  Thanks Bart, I think that’s a great feature. Will definitely have it on the roadmap!
  
  24th September 2010 Reply
Keyboardji said:

How about buddypress integration?

11th October 2010 Reply
- Michael Martin said:
  
  Definitely a popular idea I think!
  
  30th October 2010 Reply