With Wordpress 2.7, I've essentially ditched all but a few plugins (I only use five plugins). This makes things far easier, more secure and, just as importantly if you want to experiment with some of the 1000's of pre-made Wordpress themes...compatible.

Additionally, I've had too many plugins that I relied on in the past just "vanish into the night," essentially rendering the pages that depended on them useless when I upgraded to new versions of Wordpress (only to discover the plugins weren't compatible). Right now my site isn't dependent on any plugin at all, something I rather like. The site is enhanced by the handful of plugins I use, but it is no longer dependent on it (like when I relied on several photo gallery type plugins).

I personally will take a bit "more fat" if that leads to features that remove the need for dozens of plugins.

I'm particularly wary of some prat deciding to 'buy' a popular plugin from someone or even volunteering to take over the development. Imagine if the development of a major plugin was passed on to a spammer! The potential of serious damage to people's blogs, not to mention the reputation of WordPress, could be enormous.

I disagree about the bloat issue though. My concerns are mainly with not introducing new bugs (HTML bugs in the gallery and admin panel CSS bugs in particular). The new features added of late and the new ones in the pipeline all seem reasonable to me. The core is still being kept fairly small. Having the core functionality makes it easier to add more advanced functionality to the system. For example, to build an advanced photos gallery you don't need to build in the basic functionality, you can build on top of the core system hence making it easier to setup and maintain. So in a way the new core features are making it easier for developers to create new and interesting plugins.

It doesn't look like WordPress is intending to go down the Joomla route of adding everything imagineable to the core - and thankfully so!

I just checked, I have 146.
Only about a third are active...

I actually remember a poorly written plug in that was allowing me to customize my RSS feed with a copyright statement.

I had to send an email to the developer to tell him that it seems that every single of my logged in guests could do the exact same thing: change the copyright in my feed!

Saying that, I don't know anything other then WP!

But just as important - 2.3 is more bloatware than 2.6. We've learned *a ton* from serving billions of pageviews on WordPress.com and with each subsequent release we make it faster and more efficient despite adding new features. If WP gets 10% slower that means I have to order 80 new servers for WordPress.com to serve the same number of servers.

What bothers me most is when you put 2000 or so categories in the fresh installation, the Admin panels simply stop or function extremely slow. If you go to Manage Posts, or anything similar, the WP just ... dies.

But we all still like it, and still use it, and plan to continue using it, and recommending it to anyone!

That is WordPress.

Ivan | SeoConsultant.ie

That was one of the most interesting things I have read in a long time :) Thanks Dave

I am very glad to hear you are speed obsessed, I know that's a special kind of developers and I am relieved to hear that. Speed is everything, it makes or breaks it.

I am also very relieved to find out about integrated control mechanism you talked about, actually this was my biggest concern. I would be happy to join the effort of further securing WP repository. My email: vprelovac@gmail.com

Kym: Thanks mate.