Written: January 30th 2010
In my opinion the most important change in blogging software in the near future is going to be driven by the potential for new content types. It isn't the content type itself that makes the difference though, but the need to create an infrastructure around that content type to properly deal with it.
As content types go the humble blog post is pretty flexible. You get a date, some taxonomy and a big space to put HTML into and with that you can do pretty much anything you want. That, however, is the same as saying that HTML is flexible: You can make it to do whatever you want but you are going to need some scafolding to do it.
Despite that flexibility a blog post is generally not suited for use as, say, a photoblog post, for one main reason: the UI. The UI assumes HTML content with media as an insert instead of what you really need which is a single attached photograph front and centre and some text as a footnote. You can quite easily create a photoblog post by inserting a photograph into the HTML content but really the experience could be so much more.
If however you install a plugin that creates a photoblog post content type then that plugin is also going to need to create a UI for managing these posts and it is here that the potential really gets going. Even if the underlying data is the same, the alternative UI can give you options to make the end result so much richer.
As a photoblogger myself I can't wait to see a complete photoblog solution for WordPress or Habari that gets rid of the standard blog post admin and replaces it with something custom designed for selecting photographs. I've seen photoblog plugins before but none that really sorted out the UI.
This particular example is however a prelude to a wider topic and that is whether the entire admin area of a system should be removed to a selection of plugins.
As publishing systems become less specific in their focus, for example, by adding the ability to create new types, you have to ask whether it would be better to create only the most basic admin page, and move all the controls to plugins so that the software can be downloaded as 'editions'.
A photographers edition where the administration area enforces a workflow based around media might operate very differently from controls designed for designers, bloggers, static sites, etc.
There's nothing stopping plugins from removing content and replacing it, but I can't help but think that putting most admin controls into plugins sends a message that alternative admin areas are expected, and that might kickstart the desire for developers to actually create them, instead of trying to optimise what is already there to a particular need without really changing it.