After scrounging around on wordpress.org’s plugin and idea directories and not finding everything, I decided to write about some ideas of my own (without clogging up their forums). Here is a list of plugins that I don’t think have been created yet. Anyone with enough technical skills can feel free to take these ideas and turn them into actual realities if they’re interested.

10. Category Separator
Most bloggers write about some things in particular, and their categories may not all be related. For example, a business or political blog write posts pertaining to their respective topics, where categories of a business blog could include finance, stock updates, company profiles, etc. and other categories may include current events, business history, and other subtopics that may not “fit” with others.

With a plugin that splits similar categories, visitors would not get confused between categories that refer well-written content, and others that may pertain to technical updates to the website.

9. Link Editor
Some of my website’s pages have long titles, and therefore have long anchor text. For example, one of my page titles is ”How to contact or contribute”, but the link says “contact” in the menu. It took me a few hours to learn how to change that with just this themes particular code.

I would sometimes like to change my site’s link titles without spending hours learning specific PHP code, especially when I am unsure if I want to keep my current theme. If we had a plugin that allows us to choose our link’s anchor text, it would save everyone time.

8. Registration Levels
Many sites offer different services, and website members may come return to your site for different features. Some people may only want to view your posts, others may want access to videos, music, etc.

This sort of plugin could have the option of basic and premium levels of website membership. Another example may be to give access of special posts to “post registrants” and videos to “video registrants”. It also gives webmasters an opportunity to make some money.

7. Paypal Widget
As a quick way to make donations and other payments, a paypal box would make financial transactions much simpler and quicker.

6. Custom Dashboard Menu
Most people probably have a few pages in their dashboard that they use more often than others. To save bloggers time, the dashboard could have a customizable “favorites” menu section which would allow quick access to menus that may be farther apart, or three or four links deep.

5. Simple FTP Program
While I’m not looking for a full-blown file transfer protocol program, some things are used exclusively. Every wordpress user downloads plugins and themes, which don’t go anywhere else but to our web servers.

If the dashboard could somehow allow us to directly send our downloads directly to it, space is saved and the process becomes much shorter. Instead of downloading compressed files to your hard drive, extracting the contents, opening an FTP sender, setting up all the required information (such as server location and domain name), and then waiting for the files to upload, we could get our new plugins and themes in no time.

4. Login / Logout Widget
For registered users of your site, the sidebar could be an easy place to log in or out of your website. Anyone else that sees the sidebar slot could give them the simple option of registering, so guests don’t have to search for tiny text links or the rest of your blog trying to find it.

3. Post-Sidebar Integration
If this plugin was created, it could automatically add (through coding) the post number to a widget, then features you may not want in the post could be placed to the side. An example of this could be social bookmarking specifics of the post, or perhaps a poll on whether readers liked the page or not.

2. Theme Tester
At times I would want to change my sites theme to see how it looks in different styles, but whenever you activate it, the theme automatically changes for everyone viewing your site.

Although you can view samples right before you download a new theme, they are only shown with one particular setup, and not how it would look with all your posts, personalized information, etc. This would also be useful if I wanted to edit the code or make a minor adjustment to my site’s setup without making drastic alterations to your visitors.

UPDATE (8/13/07): This one does exist, you can find it here

1. Financial Tracker
Wouldn’t it be nice to keep track of all your site’s earnings from Google AdSense, banner ads, donations, etc. right from the dashboard. This way you don’t have to have 10 windows open just to find out how much money you make on a daily basis.

Another potential advantage of a tracker could be financial optimization. If the author would like to include a chart of which pages get clicks, referrals, etc., then we get the knowledge of discovering just which pages on our blogs make us the most money.

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