The distribution contains too many files in the root directory

[fulldecent]

Here are the list of files in the root directory:

index.php
license.txt
readme.html
wp-activate.php
wp-admin/
wp-blog-header.php
wp-comments-post.php
wp-config-sample.php
wp-content/
wp-cron.php
wp-includes/
wp-links-opml.php
wp-load.php
wp-login.php
wp-mail.php
wp-settings.php
wp-signup.php
wp-trackback.php
xmlrpc.php

Many people install Wordpress by putting these files directly in their webroot. This becomes cumbersome as this list of files expands with each release. It is cumbersome if, god forbid, we have other non-wordpress files to serve. Don't forget, webmasters also need to contend with .htaccess, favicons, these new apple-touch-icons and now IE10 has its own favicons and browser XML files.

Here is what simplicity looks like:

index.php
license.txt
readme.html
wp-content/

And wp-login.php becomes simple index.php?SOMETHING=wp-login

Maybe we will never get there. But at a few of these top-level PHP files can be removed so that we are moving in the right direction.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Replying to fulldecent:

Many people install Wordpress by putting these files directly in their webroot. This becomes cumbersome as this list of files expands with each release.

It actually gets smaller. We had 25 files in the root directory in 3.2, and we have 16 now, as a result of [18540], [19925], [20596], and [21818].

[iseulde]

You can put WordPress in its own directory if you want a clean root, so that's not a good argument. :)

[TobiasBg]

Also, we can't really move more of those files for backward compatibility reasons (people are directly linking to these files or including them in their own PHP code).

If you prefer a cleaner root directory, moving WordPress to a subfolder will indeed be the cleanest solution.

[netweb]

Replying to TobiasBg:

Also, we can't really move more of those files for backward compatibility reasons (people are directly linking to these files or including them in their own PHP code).

@TobiasBg See r20596 above on removing files from the root and redirecting to maintain backward compatability :)

@Fulldecent, details on what's mentioned above ​http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory