I think this is worth discussing since it seems to be a core philosophical issue that comes up a bunch, with people citing text I wrote for the about page!

The general rule we’ve followed in WordPress, which has been successful for user adoption, has been that something is “core” functionality of it is something the vast majority (80%+) will appreciate, or if it something that makes WP more robust even if they don’t care about it (revisions), or if it’s something we want to promote because we think it will make WP or the web an intrinsically better place (oembed).

Something might be a hugely popular plugin but not perfect for core because: it ties in a commercial service (Akismet), it needs to update more frequently than core does (faster dev cycle), or it adds more overhead than is worth it. For the last, we can often bring in the bare minimum or framework into core and leave the rest as a plugin (podcasting support in WP, and PodPress, or SEO improvements we make).

A bonus of core is that (in theory) the code gets better reviewed, can be relied on by new plugins to be there and build on, and maintained as part of the overall package. It also often brings new folks who may have just worked on plugins before into improving core which increases exponentially the impact of their work.

Of course there is lots of common sense along the way, this is just meant as a general framework for approaching the problem.

[@angelxube Member 14 years, 4 months ago]

Allright, I have another idea. Better and more optimized users table. I know that WP dont need more funcionality, its just applications for blogers, just few users… but when i have buddypress and disscussion board, there could be 500 or maybe more users.

Right know is really uncongortable set permission when i am migrating from another solutions. wp_usermeta for both instances and everything is at one new row? Its messy… I dont know lot about optimize but this is really messy one solution.

I know that somewhere is plugin for separated user table or better i can set it manualy but there is lot of problems with 100% integration.

[@matt Keymaster 14 years, 4 months ago]

WP’s user structure is scalable — we have over 14 million rows in wp_users on WP.com. It’s never been a bottleneck.