Two minor issues with WordPress 1.5

I love WordPress, but I have two minor issues:

1. Let me add categories from within the Write Post page. This could be done relatively easy by Ajax, right? Or something less trendy? Whatever works, gang. But as categories (and bloggers) migrate more towards tagging, I for one often find myself saving a finished post as draft, switching over to the Manage Categories page and adding in tags (categories) specific to that post, and then returning to my post to update and publish it.

In the words of Homer Simpson, “can’t someone else do it?” Such as my blogging software?

2. Don’t automatically categorize my posts with anything by default…so then the question becomes, what if I forget? Does the system break?

Well that brings me to a design/interface suggestion that I think would be an both an enhancement and a user-switcher (my phrase for a design element that organically prevents a user from unwanted behavior) all in one (Keep in mind I haven’t upgraded to WP1.5.1 yet so I don’t know what they’ve tweaked).

The change I suggest is that the category chooser (it’s currently to the right of the blog post input area) should be moved in line on the page directly below the blog post input box.

In my view, the category chooser should not be located above the blog post input box (and for that matter, I think the post title input box should be moved down, too), because if you’re anything like me, you find that categories (and titles) are a natural extension of the body of what you’re writing…so it should follow that you can only logically categorize your words after they’re written, right?

From a programming standpoint, not much should have to change. I’m no database expert, but I’m betting that the excellent WP team could write some code to dump in your new categories at the same time as the post is saved.