What we should have is an implementation whereby every journal entry is a new topic, and then comments are replies to that topic. Switching to this will not only be a performance win, but it will be a functionality win as well - some things are simply impossible to support under the current journal implementation (for example, closing comments on a single entry), while other things are needlessly duplicated (for example, RSS feeds - if a journal is just a collection of thread-first-posts, we can reuse the RSS we've got for providing feeds of a forum).
There are also other changes I want to make with regards to the way journals are actually retrieved and rendered - to the extent that I'm basically rewriting them from scratch, using tasty things like XML queries and XSLT to make it clean and fast.
One of the things I can change is the way the right-side bar is rendered. I'm not massively happy with the way the bar looks on journals currently; the calendar isn't particularly useful, the RSS button is obsolete, and the monthly links are just run together into a single unstructured list. You can see my proposed replacement here.
The biggest thing I'm not sure about is whether people will be upset by me dropping the Calendar. I think it's fairly useless, but I know some people enjoy making little patterns on it and so on. Implementing it will take a fair bit of work - there's a whole extra DB table that appears to be dedicated to it - so if I can get away without it then I'd quite like to, but what do you think?
Also, a couple of 'requests' for a re-write would be;
- a 'post to journal' button which takes me straight to my posting page, right now having to go via the control panel is just annoying and often I'll be checking my journal before I post in order to tie entries together or reply to replies others have made.
- talking of replies; it's slightly bothersome that you can't see a copy of the post/entry you are replying to below the reply box as you can in the forums. This generally leads to me writing the reply in notepad or, in most cases, simply not bothering to reply due to the extra effort involved.