WordPress 2.3 is now in Beta mode, if you don’t already know! And there have been a slurry of improvements, but one area that needs improvement in my books is… well, can you guess…

If you can’t guess, that’s my drafts folder with I don’t exactly know how many ideas I have in there for posts.

I thought I was bad until I saw this image. Then I read about a guy who regularly wrote …

I write a lot of content that isn’t time-sensitive so it tends to chill. I usually have about 100+ drafts lying around. I mucked around with the admin templates to break it down by category, but it is still tremendously awkward to work with. Powerful drafting functionality is right near the top of my list of desired improvements. (by Xander).

It’s quite clear that there are a number of ways that WordPress could improve its drafting tools as well as ideas generation. I wish I were a coder, because I could surely implement some of my ideas. Well it seems that, amongst other features, WordPress 2.3 which is in beta and coming soon has implemented some helpful features. Then I got wind that WordPress.com had already implemented some of the ideas, and sure enough, they had. Take a look!

You’ll see that Drafts, instead of being below the blue bar, now have their own separate filter/tag view. Click on the Status Dropdown menu, and hit ‘draft’. Quickly and conveniently your posts in draft mode appear listed below. Of course, you can filter further by ‘month’, ‘category’, and ‘search term’. This should help to keep drafts under control somewhat! Let’s hope that feature makes it to the Release Candidate.

I’d also suggest that we could separate drafts into ‘ideas’ (ideas for posts, with a few words and sentences only), ‘notes’ (for posts that have upto about 50 words or so, and can be grouped on one page conveniently) and ‘drafts’ for ideas or notes that have ‘grown’ and are being scheduled for publication. That would help me a lot, as many of my drafts are just ideas or tips or links that might one day become full posts, but I don’t have any way to write them now. Both ‘notes’ and ‘ideas’ could be displayed on one single page with little buttons underneath, saying something like ‘promote to notes/ideas’, ‘post to drafts’ or even ‘publish’…. That’d be nice.