Here are the top things that need to be or are being worked on in Kicker.
They are rated as to expected difficulty, from one to five stars.
They are also rated as to desirability, from one to five plusses.

Hot Bugs
--------
These are bugs that really should get some attention.

**    various bugs: kicker is not listening to font/color/etc changes
      this likely requires looking at taskbar, buttons, etc listening to the
      appropriate changes via the KApplication::settingsChanged family of
      signals
**    79088
***** 41201. Solution: use the improved NetWM strut geometry
*     87884
      there is more of a QA testing overhead here than an actual hacking
      overhead on this one.. this just requires a change to 
      kdebase/kcontrol/kicker on the arrangement tab. the slider should allow
      values > 128. you can actually make this change by editting the UI file
      in Qt Designer.

      this change would need to be tested for effect with the main panel,
      childpanels and the external taskbar set to larger sizes, all in both
      vertical and horizontal mode.




Being Worked On
---------------
**** QLayout in ContainerArea (Wilco Greven)
     Stuff that's broken right now:
     - The panel doesn't adjust it's size when an applet changes its size.
     - Drag and drop.
     - Adding applets. Works, but they need to be added at more suitable
       position, not at the end.
     - Autoscroll when moving a container.
     - BR#92460: scroll buttons showing at startup when they shouldn't be there
     - More? (please add it here)

***  Removing Panel::the() (Aaron Seigo)
***  Smooth Zooming Icons (Aaron Seigo)
**   Breaking out the kicker control panel tabs into individual panels
     for when its called from the panel menu (Aaron Seigo)

Priority, But Unnasigned
-----------------------
+++++ Keyboard accessability
****
      We will follow the lead of the GNOME panel accessability work:
      http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/keynav/panelnav.html

      To summarise:

      - Ctrl-Alt-Tab cycles focus between panels [Shift to reverse]
      - Tab cycles focus between objects on the focused panel [Shift to
        reverse]
      - Arrow keys move focus within a focused applet
      - Space activates focused control (on panel or within an applet)

+++++ KConfigXT-ize kicker's settings.
***   Making the KConfigXT file is easy, switching everything over to use
      it is tedious, but porting the control panel is the real annoyance.
      Therefore the 3 stars even though this isn't very difficult to do.

      Note that this will entail cleaning up how KConfig objects are
      used in kicker. We read a LOT from KConfig objects in kicker, often
      reading the same setting(s) over and over when they could/should
      be member vars. More use of KConfigGroup would also be good.
      This includes not just kickerrc but the taskbarrc as well.


++++  Special casing the menubar
***   The menubar applet needs to be special cased so that it can replace
      the legacy "MacOS-style menubar". In particular it needs to be
      autocreated on a panel if the menubar option is set (this is in
      kdebase/konq/desktopbehaviour*), it needs to be hidden from the
      Add -> Applets menu and it needs to have the applet handle removed
      from it in all cases.

++++  Text labels for buttons
**    Either on mouse over or always-displayed labels. Tooltips are ugly
      and just don't cut it.

++++  Refactoring manager classes
***   There are several classes that perform similar or complementary
      functions to other classes, and several of these same classes are
      singletons or only instantiated once. This just begs for a
      refactoring to make the codebase smaller and simpler. Targets
      include removing PanelManager, merging PluginManager/PluginLoader,
      ExtensionManager/PluginLoader, investigating the necessity of
      MenuManager...

++++  Drag and drop enhancements
***   Drag and drop behaviour is broken in various ways in kicker. In
      particular, dragging from one panel to another should allow one
      to move rather than copy the element. A popup menu should appear
      on drop like in Konqueror and KMail. Dropping on buttons like
      QuickBrowsers, the Home icon, etc should behave consistently and
      like dropping to a file manager window. There are many DnD reports
      on bugs.kde.org which can provide further inspiration.

++++  Systray icon layout
****  The systray applet does a very basic homebrew layout of the icons
      that currently has several flawed assumptions that break when used
      with certain applications. These assumptions include that all icons
      in a given row will be approximately the same width and that things
      are always LTR (left to right). It should use a QGridLayout and
      do some semi-intelligent packing of the icons.

++++  Strut layout management
***** Right now panels in kicker have very, very basic strut management.
      This is because kicker was originally designed to take up the entire
      side of a screen and was largely written on non-multiscreen setups.
      When one introduces panels < 100% in width or Xinerama the simplistic
      strut management starts to show its weaknesses.

+++   Make the taskbar button context menus more like kwin's context menus
*     The entries and order of entries do not match between the taskbar buttons
      and kwin's window menu. This should be rectified as much as possible.

+++   Text labels for buttons
**    Either on mouse over or always-displayed labels. Tooltips are ugly
      and just don't cut it.

++    Dialog for adding elements to the panel
***   Context menus are primarily used by advanced users, and yet this is
      the only way to manage the items on the panel. There used to be a
      control panel that allowed turning on or off applets on the main panel
      but this is obviously too restrictive and I'd prefer not to see yet
      another tab in the kicker control panels. A dialog that shows previews
      of the specials buttons and applets and allows one to either drag and
      drop or with a button add items to a given panel would make kicker that
      much more accessable to more of our users.
