And it’s quite easy to make your theme act in this way (although not with all the options your plugin offers): just register a widget area and call it something like Single page sidebar and then make sure that only single.php refers to it. If you’re using sidebar.php then you’d need to use some conditional code with is_page.

WordPress would lose its simplicity if it added custom data types. Maybe that means it should be a forked project?

Or maybe leave as is and encourage developers to write plugins that provide additional functionality, a la Firefox.

There are lots of differences, though: WordPress is getting more and more feature filled (check out the work that php wp_list_comments() does in 2.8, while updates tend to entail a lot more development work.

The thing about WordPress that makes it attractive as a CMS tool is that it’s easy for non-technical clients/users to operate. If the WordPress team created a full CMS application, I’m sure they’d make it easier to use than Expression Engine, Drupal or Joomla.

But since that doesn’t seem to be on the horizon, I’m still hoping that Expression Engine 2 and beyond will bridge the gap. Right now it’s hardly an intuitive tool for backend users.

This article was going to be called “5 changes…”, with your pie–in–the–sky suggestion as number 5. WordPress is still blogging software at heart; your suggestion would make it a full CMS. There are plugins that can help do this (and enable AJAX editing).

The problem with adding custom data types would be that it would perhaps lose its simplicity. But that’ll be the big change—I wonder when/if it’ll ever happen?

As for pie in the sky feature requests, I’d like to see custom data/post types like you can get in Expression Engine or Drupal (with the CCK addon). I would also love to see on-page AJAX editing abilities, like you get when using Flickr.