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  • Matías Ventura 5:40 pm on October 12, 2013 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
    Tags: ,   

    THX (Themes) Update 

    The past week we’ve been committing significant updates to the plugin.

    Screen Shot 2013-10-12 at 3.19.55 PM

    Here’s a list of the changes that went in for version 0.7 (major props to @shaunandrews):

    • A lot of work went into rethinking how modal-overlay works and looks for showing the expanded theme view.
    • Adds keyboard navigation (with arrow keys) to quickly browse through themes while on details/modal view.
    • Significant JavaScript refactoring and cleanup.
    • Adds “delete” theme functionality.
    • Implements theme updates notices on theme grid, and update info on modal view.
    • Adds a theme count to the section title that updates immediately with search.
    • Several style improvements: theme blocks on grid view, add new theme, hover indicators, active theme more prominent, screenshot gallery with thumbnails, responsive styles, and a bunch more.

    The keyboard navigation is becoming a pretty nice way to quickly flip through themes.

    Screen Shot 2013-10-12 at 3.20.05 PM

    What’s left?

    Functionality wise it’s getting there, but we still have to keep polishing. (I’m being told modals are broken in Firefox.) We are a small team, so any reviews and suggestions are welcome — code or otherwise. Next up for JS rendering is looking into scaling issues (when, say, you have 200+ themes).

     

    • Ulrich 5:53 pm on October 12, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Looks really good. :)

      Some strings are not internationalized or could be improved.

      There are some issues on the install theme page. The upload theme button is also missing.

      • Matías Ventura 5:27 pm on October 15, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Added some more i18n. I should have mentioned it in the post but the theme-install page is all sort of broken. I’ll disable it until we have it more in shape.

    • biznis86 7:16 am on October 15, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Not sure where to start. Overall, it’s nice, but loads of stuff is just wrong:

      • Missing upload button.
      • Missing navigation button (left,right) for multiple themes slider
      • If theme has no image screenshot, it gets crippled, plain white CSS image would be a good replacement
      • Spacing between theme thumbnails is not in line, top-bottom : left-right. Overall it’s too much white space
      • Magnifier icon on-hover doesn’t link to search, so it would be better to use icon that links to keywords “detail, more, open,…”
      • Instead of modals that are pretty bad for mobile experience, use sth like google image search has

      I hope my feedback helps in any way to make WP a better product.

      • shaunandrews 5:39 pm on October 15, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Missing upload button.
        Missing navigation button (left,right) for multiple themes slider

        The install themes page is still a work-in-progress.

        If theme has no image screenshot, it gets crippled, plain white CSS image would be a good replacement

        Ah, thanks for pointing this out. We’ll look into supporting themes without a screenshot.

        Spacing between theme thumbnails is not in line, top-bottom : left-right. Overall it’s too much white space

        The spacing is a percentage, and varies depending on your window width. I think the whitespace is balanced well.

        Magnifier icon on-hover doesn’t link to search, so it would be better to use icon that links to keywords “detail, more, open,…”

        I’m open to other suggestions for the icon. The magnifying glass felt natural to me, but I can see your point about it being related to search. Perhaps the “eye” icon: https://cloudup.com/cY2LbtWKezc

        Instead of modals that are pretty bad for mobile experience, use sth like google image search has

        Did you look at the screen on a smaller device? Or just shrink your browser window down — The modal becomes a full-screen overlay at smaller sizes.

        I’m not sure what “sth” is…

    • alexdumitru 5:29 pm on October 15, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I’ve just installed it on WP 3.7 beta 2 and it came with broken permissions. All folders were 750 instead of 755, so all files were returning 404.

      I think it must have something to do with MP6, as I’ve tried installing other plugins too and they do work very well.

      • alexdumitru 5:30 pm on October 15, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        P.S. I LOVE MP6. It looks wonderful !

      • designsimply 4:45 pm on October 19, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        The THX38 plugin files were the wrong permissions, or the MP6 ones? Did you install the plugin by going to Plugins > Add New > Search and clicking the “Install Now” link? Could you try deleting the plugin and installing it again using that route? If you see the same problem happen again, could you start a help request at http://wordpress.org/support/ and link it in a reply here?

    • TimothyBlynJacobs 9:20 pm on October 17, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Looks really awesome. Curious, why did you round off the previously square version box. I think it looks far better without the rounded corners – they seem out of place since the rest of the modal is highly rectangular.

  • lessbloat 7:11 pm on October 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    DASH Update 

    It’s been a couple of weeks. We’ve been heads down getting stuff done.

    So, where are we at?

    Here’s the existing dashboard:

    Here’s what our new dashboard looks like:

    What’s changed?

    We removed one widget:

    • Incoming links (which doesn’t really work anymore)

    We combined several widgets:

    • “WordPress Blog”, “Other WordPress News”, and “Plugins” as combined to form the new “WordPress News” plugin.
    • “Recent Comments” was merged into the new “Activity” widget, which now also shows you any scheduled posts and your last 5 most recently published posts.
    • “QuickPress” was changed to “Quick Drafts”, and we merged in “Recent Drafts”.

    Plus we worked on a few additional things:

    • The Right Now widget was simplified.
    • We removed the “Number of columns” screen option. Instead the dashboard is now responsive, and shows the appropriate number of columns based on your screen resolution.
    • We replaced the “Dashboard” H2 title with a fun group of friendly welcome text and idioms.
    • The new “Activity” widget will be hookable, so plugin authors can easily add additional info to it.
    • There’s a fun little smiley if you delete all posts and comments

    What’s left?

    • Code reviews. If you have time over the weekend, please look over our code. If you spot something, and need commit access to the plugin, just ping me in IRC. I’ll be doing a code review of my own (but I’m not a PHP developer, so we could still use your help). We’d like to have this code core-ready by Monday.
    • We still need to write new help tab text for each of these dashboard widget changes.
    • I’ll be adding the “Activity” widget hooks this weekend.

    Huge thanks!

    Major props to @joen, @ryelle, @dbernar1, @kraftbj, and @tillkruess without whom, this plugin would not exist.

    Also big props to @helen, @melchoyce, @samuelsidler, Hassan Hisham, and Valerio Al Kalib for helping out along the way.

     

    • Ulrich 7:24 pm on October 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Looks nice

      Have you thought how this will be translated?
      “We replaced the “Dashboard” H2 title with a fun group of friendly welcome text and idioms.”

      I saw one array where the values were not starting on a new line.
      http://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/coding-standards/php/#indentation
      There were a few places where the spacing was not to WordPress coding standards.

      What is going to happen about inline documentation?

    • Manuel Schmalstieg 7:41 pm on October 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      “Recent Comments” was merged into the new “Activity” widget, which now also shows you any scheduled posts and your last 5 most recently published posts.

      Yes! Showing the 5 most recent posts is such a great idea. This will save me a gazillion of clicks. Lovely work, DASH team!

    • Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 9:01 pm on October 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Last 5 posts isn’t working.

      http://cl.ly/image/1R0o2Y3e3t1n

      Those are my first couple posts. Happens on all sites I tested running 3.7-nightly

    • Rami Yushuvaev 10:15 pm on October 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Found few RTL issues, i uploaded 6 screenshots to:

      https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/25577

    • Andy Mercer 3:09 pm on October 12, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Been busy for the past few weeks and haven’t been following the weekly updates. It’s looking good! If I might ask though, what happened to the stats widget that was floated a while back?

      • Hassan 8:12 pm on October 12, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        It was a wishful mockup!

        Core won’t ship with stats out of the box. Apparently because of DB load concerns and stuff, but hey! we still have plugins for that :D

    • Daniel Bachhuber 3:50 pm on October 14, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      One thing I might suggest is making the widgets as hookable as possible. I think you could offer a lot of flexibility by offering actions at the beginning and ending of each widget, as you’ve done with the activity widget, and applying a filter to each set of post / comment query arguments.

      Also, based on a cursory look, this plugin would benefit from a code review sooner rather than later.

      • lessbloat 4:04 pm on October 14, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        think you could offer a lot of flexibility by offering actions at the beginning and ending of each widget, as you’ve done with the activity widget, and applying a filter to each set of post / comment query arguments.

        That’s a great idea.

        Also, based on a cursory look, this plugin would benefit from a code review sooner rather than later.

        We’d love, love, love for someone to step up and do this. :-)

    • Manuel Schmalstieg 10:21 am on October 16, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I notice that the usual “unset” commands don’t work – if I want to hide the QuickDraft for some reason, I usually did it with this:

      unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['side']['core']['dashboard_quick_press']);

      Is there a new syntax to use, or did the names of the boxes change, or is it just not working yet?

      Also, I remember that there was no simple way to assign a new custom widget to a specific place in the dashboard. For instance, if I add a very important custom dashboard widget, there was no way to tell “Your default position shall be on TOP of the RIGHT column, for every user”.

      Is this going to change? (wishful thinking)

      • Manuel Schmalstieg 10:26 am on October 16, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Also, wondering why DASH isn’t using i18n functions for terms that already exist? Many of the strings are already translated in the main UI, why not use them?

    • Manuel Schmalstieg 10:36 am on October 16, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Regarding the new and improved “Site Content” widget, I wonder if it’s necessary to show any content that has “zero” items…

      Imagine a portfolio site that has entirely disabled comments, there’s no reason to plague the user with the “0 Comments” message – which can be misinterpreted in a “see how unpopular you are” way :)

  • Joen Asmussen 7:00 pm on October 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
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    MP6 2.1 

    Been a while since last tagged release, but it’s not been quiet on the MP6 dev front. Major new items aside from a plethora of bugfixes include:

    • A bunch of new dashicons
    • A spiffy new widgets page by Shaun Andrews from his Widgets project
    • Improvements to customizer, color schemes, menus section and much more
    • New color scheme, Midnight!

    You can also peruse the full changelog, and of course get the plugin at the MP6 plugin page.

    MP6 2.1 includes contributions from Till Krüss, Mel Choyce, Ben Dunkle, Kelly Dwan, Shaun Andrews, Payton Swick, Matt Thomas, Helen Hou-Sandi, Dave Whitley, Kate Whitley, and myself.

    Big thanks to the contributors, bug reporters, testers, moral supporters and givers of ideas and suggestions! Keep it coming.

    The next weekly open meeting in #wordpress-ui will be Monday, October 14 at 18:00 UTC.

     

    • toscho 10:41 pm on October 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      When will the automatic update be rolled out? Reinstalling this plugin manually each time is not very convenient.

      • Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 11:27 pm on October 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Huh? WP 3.7 auto updates itself, not plugins. And this plugin can be normal upgraded. Worked fine on 3.6 and 3.7 beta

        • toscho 7:04 am on October 12, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          Sorry for the confusion. What I meant: I never get an update indicator for MP6. Works fine for all other plugins, but not for MP6. I always have to delete and to reinstall it.

          • Justin Tadlock 1:18 am on October 17, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

            It was like that for a long time for me too. Then, one day it just started working. I have no idea why.

            • toscho 6:17 am on October 17, 2013 Permalink

              Yesterday I got finally my first update notice for this plugin. Looks like it is fixed now. I just would like to know why it didn’t before.

            • Till Krüss 7:44 am on October 17, 2013 Permalink

              Automatic updates are working since a couple of MP6 releases, 1.4 if I remember correctly, but you only see them if you WordPress version matches the version requirement of MP6′s readme.txt file.

      • Till Krüss 1:22 am on October 12, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        You can update to MP6 2.1 through your WordPress admin, no need to reinstall anymore. If you are referring to automatic background updates, you can enable them for MP6 using the `auto_upgrade_plugin` filter.

    • addressee 5:38 pm on October 12, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      re: MP6 2.1 Appearance > Widgets

      Liking the new icons and styling/behavior for this section of admin. It’s nice to see but seems perhaps a little incomplete

      Overall, the Widgets page no longer has a description, leaving a user to guess what the Widgets page does.

      The widgets location section (“widget-liquid-right”) could be improved with a hinting of the status of a widget location: If populated, indicate with a visible icon or shading. If empty, present the collapsed location as-is with no icon visible. The side-by-side presentation of widget locations unfortunately hinders presentation of the natural top-down precedence of the widget areas. The same hinting could also be used for the Inactive Widgets section.

      Available Widgets no longer has a description, leaving a user to guess what the widget does, or a new widget to be left unexplained. A description could be hinted on hover or on mousedown (preferred) or selected optionally.

      Available widgets are placed in a scrolling list, which is located inside a scrolling window. This is the styling that long-plagued the post-editor page, only to be ‘fixed’ with a full-screen editor option. Please don’t let the widgets page suffer the scroll-within-a-scroll problem. Also, if Inactive Widgets is collapsed, you’re left with a scrolling window above a large expanse of blank page.

      The evolution of MP6 is interesting to follow.

    • Ulrich 1:32 pm on October 15, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      There is a slight issue with the admin bar on smaller screens. Some plugins and themes add links to the admin bar and as these links break the layout on smaller devices. RTL tester is a plugin that adds a link if anyone want to test it. http://wordpress.org/plugins/rtl-tester/

    • Looimaster 8:27 am on October 16, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Just my two cents: customizer that changes its colors makes it difficult to be used with color pickers or jQuery UI sliders and other custom sections. Do theme authors need to style it for each customizer skin? In my opinion Customizer should have plain white background at all times.

    • Justin Tadlock 1:27 am on October 17, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Nice work. I’m loving the new Midnight theme and have switched all my sites to it.

      The widgets screen is awesome too. I’m not sure I’m sold on the scrollbar for the “widgets” section of that screen though.

      The customizer design is a nice touch. I did find one minor issue with the image uploader on the customizer. With three tabs (Upload New, Uploaded, and Default), the third tab drops down. It’d be nice if we could get at least that third one in line with the others. Check out the screenshot:
      http://justintadlock.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/mp6-three-image-tabs.png

    • Amado.Miami 4:31 pm on October 17, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Definitely missing the widget descriptions. Finding myself going back to non MP6 widget screens to get the description. It looks nice, yet for me personally the widget descriptions are very important.

    • Paal Joachim Romdahl 9:05 pm on October 18, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      What about right below the drop down select color scheme have 4 hexcode boxes for the user to add custom hexcode for the most used color areas?

    • mrwweb 10:33 pm on October 18, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I think it’s been this way for a while, but I’m suddenly really struck by the lack of visible arrow indicators on metaboxes/widgets etc. They appear on hover, but for something like a collapsed sidebar on Appearance > Widgets, there is no visual indication that a sidebar is toggled closed or toggled open.

      I think making these indicators persistently visible would be a fairly minimal and easy change with a big win. Items that can collapse/expand would suddenly be much clearer for everyone new to the interface. Also, no hover on touch, so that.

    • Ulrich 7:01 am on October 19, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      There is some layout issues on the new 3.7 about page. /wp-admin/about.php

      Here it how it looks normally-
      https://www.diigo.com/item/image/4dblo/a7wj

      And here with mp6
      https://www.diigo.com/item/image/4dblo/876j

    • Paal Joachim Romdahl 12:57 pm on October 19, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      MP6 and contrast between boxes and the background. Looking through various screen the boxes blend too much into the background. Having just a pinch of darker border contrast will help to separate the two.

      In regards to the widget screen. A large layout causes there to be two columns for both widget areas. Taking it one step smaller we suddenly have a large left widgets area and a smaller right area. It would be nice to wait with taking the one step smaller until the screen size is even smaller then what is seen today. I created a post about this: http://easywebdesigntutorials.com/wordpress/mp6-and-the-widgets-screen/

      When looking at my contrast screen one can obviously see the difference between a little darker border around the boxes then what mp6 uses today. Perhaps someplace between what I am showing and the existing mp6 css will help create a better contrast of boxes and background.

  • Mel Choyce 5:22 pm on October 1, 2013 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
    Tags: ,   

    MP6 Color Schemes 

    Hi there, WordPress community.

    The MP6 team has been working on adding color schemes in the past couple weeks. Now, we’d like to get your input about which color schemes you want to see make it into the core plugin. Please check out the schemes and let us know which color schemes you would use:

    Which of these MP6 color schemes would you use?

    We’re also taking suggestions for color scheme names.

     

    • Terry Sutton 5:24 pm on October 1, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Ectoplasm for life!

    • Valerio Souza 5:37 pm on October 1, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I would love it if it had an option to force all users to have a pre-defined layout.

    • esmi 7:07 pm on October 1, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      All of the suggested color schemes re very pretty but what would be really cool would be to have at least 1 user-selectable high contrast scheme for visually impaired users. Yellow on black would be one possible option. Ditto a very low contrast scheme for some dyslexics. I’d be more than happy to wok on this with someone.

      • Helen Hou-Sandi 7:19 pm on October 1, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Have you taken a look at the default and light themes? Note that this poll is regarding *extra* schemes.

      • Trifon 8:47 am on October 3, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        The readability of the default is really good for me (being dyslexic myself). You should take a look at it, for I think that it works great for your purposes.

      • Mel Choyce 8:58 am on October 3, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Let me know if either of the default schemes (light or dark) works — if not, I’d love to chat some time in the next week about making a high and/or low contrast scheme. At the very least, we could create a plugin pack of accessibility-focused color schemes.

        That reminds me — it would also be great to make a plugin that replaces Open Sans with OpenDyslexic (which would be super easy if we were using a pre-processor for more than just color schemes!).

        • Joe Dolson 11:17 pm on October 4, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          I looked into the OpenDyslexic question, but unfortunately it’s not under a GPL compatible license (CCA 3.0 Unported). I couldn’t find any other Dyslexia-focused fonts that were under GPL licenses, so doesn’t seem to be an option.

          • Mel Choyce 11:19 pm on October 4, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

            Oh no! For some reason I thought it was MIT. Bummer.

            • Joe Dolson 12:12 am on October 5, 2013 Permalink

              Yeah, I thought so too — I knew they’d been wanting to get it into Google Fonts, so I’d assumed it was something GPL compatible…but no.

    • Native Imaging 8:00 pm on October 1, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I thin Color schemes are a bit of waste of efforts. Why not just create a panel to define your own color schemes, and let users import and export them.

      What I am hoping to see are the bug fixes and hard CSS resets for the Admin.

      I know it must be hard or nearly impossible to hard reset all of the CSS HTML and scripts running inside of 3rd party plugin developers. but what I see, is a Union of Compliance that needs to be set and sponsored by the best-of-the-best plugin developers. There needs to be some form of speed-optimization and responsive-touch standards implemented into all plugins, or else, get chucked-from-the-movement. The utmost complaint I have from 90% of clients is that their windows OS’s are not working , and they can’t even get online due to Anti-Virus softwares. #2, they are completely flabbergasted when trying to understand the wordpress backend, even when all they see is Posts, Pages, and Profile as an Author. WordPress has an awesome core that can be configured in anyway, but I’m watching the innovative progress of the MP6 plugin slowing down.

      Certain things that are unfixed problems i’ve personally noticed (yet I still use MP6 on every single website I maintain)
      • unchecked boxes are horizontally collapsed.
      • viewing admin bar horizontally on mobile devices is broken.
      • Media Uploader does not work at all for mobile touch ready devices. Should load in a full screen container with BIG BUTTONS creating galleries and/or images.
      • Drag and drop does not seem to utilize the predefined styles for Android & iOS.
      • No one uses their computers anymore, and sadly said that the WordPress App does not work at all for 90% of the devices I’ve test it on.
      • The MP6 is a good start, but it’s still labeled as a secret. WE NEED Responsive and Speed Optimized Compliance with all large plugin authors. I hope to see a network created soon to encourage this type of flexible development for all successful developers.
      • Users are On-the-go and this should be taken into consideration for all developed plugins. (Hence some sort of compliance needs to be encouraged. )

      Other than that, other bugs are small, and I hope that the MP6 does see its way into the WP, core and probably should’ve been a while back. Social Media continues to dominate the average/Non-Savvy computer user. Today, only 10% of clients use computers, and less than 2% of visitors come from desktop computers. The numbers are staggering and falling each day.

      Sorry if i’m posting in the wrong thread, but just wanted to share my opinions about the MP6 development and where its getting of track and falling behind…

      • Hassan 9:02 am on October 3, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Good points here.

        While I agree that desktop traffic is slowly declining, I believe your statements “No one uses their computers anymore” and “only 10% of clients use computers” are a bit incorrect. I maintain a couple of sites where the vast majority of users come from their desktop PCs. Mobile might be on the rise, but it is still site-specific. Some sites -by their nature- attract more mobile visitors, while others do the opposite. So, yeah, it’s subjective.

        That said, I do not see desktops going anywhere anytime soon. They still have looong life left :)

    • hakaner 11:16 pm on October 2, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I prefer an option to create your own.

    • Hassan 10:06 am on October 3, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      MP6 dark, light, and midnight schemes are the one’s I’d probably use. Not particularly fond with the other ones; they look kind of “out of sync” to me, though I’m not really sure what that means :)

      The idea of users having the ability to create their own custom schemes sounds interesting indeed! Perhaps something like a color picker..

    • Terence 2:51 pm on October 10, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Sorry, not a bug or a fix, just a want ~ I would really like to know if anyone is working on a plugin or extension/s to MP6 which would allow me to run a webstore (Woo Commerce) in the back-end, like WordPress.com does. Either that or I am going to have to break my promise and go learn how to code it. Now you wouldn’t want that on your conscience would you? Well WOULD YOU?… 8^)

      • Mel Choyce 2:54 pm on October 10, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Hi Terence, MP6 is just a visual update to wp-admin. There are plenty of e-commerce plugins for WordPress.org you can use. If you google “best wordpress ecommerce plugins” you should be able to find some helpful information.

  • lessbloat 1:30 am on September 29, 2013 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    DASH Update 

    Accomplished this week

    1) Fairly quiet week. Some progress on our planning spreadsheet.

    2) No IRC chat this week. None next week either. Our next chat will be Tuesday, October 8th, 2:00pm UTC in #wordpress-ui.

    3) @ryelle coded up the new “Right Now” widget.

    4) I made a few adjustments to the structure of the plugin.

    5) @kraftbj made a first stab at removing the columns screen option

    Up next

    • Coding, coding, coding. Continue bringing Joen’s designs to life.
    • Again, we’ll skip our regularly scheduled IRC chat next week. Our next IRC chat will be Tuesday, October 8th, 2:00pm UTC in #wordpress-ui.
     

  • Matías Ventura 6:27 pm on September 25, 2013 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
    Tags: ,   

    THX38 Update 

    We’ve been busy building and improving the plugin. We are approaching the point of a full feature prototype, which will allow us to start testing smaller incremental changes.

    I committed the first pass at the browse themes screen based on the mockups we’ve discussed before:

    Screen Shot 2013-09-24 at 4.30.13 PM

    By the way, we are running a bit short on development resources, so if you are proficient in PHP and/or JS and want to contribute to this project, please, either chime in to one of our weekly chats or ping me directly. We are using Backbone to build all the theme views. We started a short document with the current tasks.

    Screen Shot 2013-09-24 at 4.29.43 PM

    We have two tasks going on: make theme switching work with the current prototype, and finish implementing theme fetching to the install-themes screen.

     

  • shaunandrews 5:14 pm on September 24, 2013 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
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    Widgets Sept 23 Chat Notes 

    We had our weekly chat yesterday. If you weren’t there, you can always check out those cool log things.

    A few highlights:

    • We adopted the Widget Customizer plugin as our customizer prototype
    • I tossed out the idea of a “mission control” view for the tabbed prototype, which would let you see all your sidebars at once. The goal with this is to make it easier to move (and maybe copy) widgets between sidebars. Check out the video of this concept in action.
    • We pondered the question “Can the tabbed prototype and the customizer prototype coexist?” Turns out every one seems to agree that both interfaces can coexist. The tabbed prototype lends itself to more advanced functionality with lots of widgets, while the customizer plugin makes it super simple to edit (and perhaps add) widgets to the areas that are currently visible in the preview.
    • I brought up the idea of a way to preview widgets from the tabbed prototype. Turns out this is difficult (and maybe impossible) to accomplish since we won’t know what page the sidebar lives on, or if it even exists. I’d love to find a way to make this possible.
    • Weston got his temporary hooks included in 25580 — yay! This opens up a lot of possibilities for the customizer plugin.
    • We discussed a few ideas for how to add widgets from the customizer. I whipped up a quick sketch showing an extension to the customizer bar.
    • We discussed cleaning up the list of available widgets. The tabbed prototype has renamed a few widgets, and removed the descriptions.
    • Weston brought up the idea of preview thumbnails for widgets. The thumbnails would show a preview of how that widget would look in the current theme. This would require that all widgets have some “dummy” content. Perhaps we could extend this to existing widgets, as well. Having a preview of each widget in the tabbed prototype may help solidify the connection to their location on the front-end. Super cool idea.
    • We discussed the menu-like prototype briefly. I’ve chatted with jtsternburg about his progress. He and his his wife recently welcomed their third child (and future blogger) into the world — congrats! As his time is limited, he’s unable to continue work on the menu-like prototype. He’ll be sharing his code soon, so we can pick it up and get it to a testable stage.

    Our next steps:

    • Continued work on the customizer plugin, and lots more user testing.
    • Connect with the front-end team to see how we can collaborate with widget editing.
    • Pickup the menu-like prototype and get it to a testable stage.
    • Follow @lessbloat‘s lead and create a planning spreadsheet to help define tasks and roles.

    I’ll be out of town next week. While I encourage everyone to meet in IRC, our next official meeting will be in two weeks on October 7th, 2013 @ 20:00 UTC.

     

    • Weston Ruter 5:49 pm on September 24, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Regarding widget thumbnail previews, the way I was thinking it could be done is when switching a theme or when a new widget is registered, WordPress could initiate a request to an ad hoc page containing just the widget, and take a screenshot (with some canvas tool) and then save the screenshot to the database. This request would have to be done in the background in some hidden iframe. It would be very cool, but it also seems like a horrible hack.

      Something more feasible would be if we introduced icons to WP_Widget. When instantiating a WP_Widget:

      function __construct() {
	parent::__construct(
		'my_text_widget', // Base ID
		__('My Text Widget', 'text_domain'), // Name
		array(
			'description' => __( 'So much better than text!', 'text_domain' ), 
			'icon_url' => includes_url( 'images/widget-icons/text.png' ),
		)
	);
}

      This icon_url concept is used in add_menu_page(). The widget icons could then be displayed on the widgets page and anywhere else that widgets are managed, to allow them to be easily recognized quickly. The core patch to add support for icon_url would require adding a generic widget icon, and icons for all widgets bundled with WordPress.

      In addition to icon_url there could also be a screenshot_url argument. This would be analogous to themes which allow you to include a screenshot.png. Sure the widget screenshot would not be reflective of how it would exactly appear in the current theme, but it would give a good visual overview of what you’re going to get when you add the widget. To see how the widget will look exactly in your theme, the user can just go ahead and add it in the customizer and then can preview how it will look, and decide then whether they want it.

      Thoughts?

    • ntl0820 6:13 pm on September 24, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Great prototypes Shaun! I love the tabbed interface, much easier I think and makes good use of the space.

      I think the idea of a preview is a great idea. Maybe you could have it automatically use the default template for a page, but then have a dropdown to select a specific page to see what it would look like on that specific page?

      I’d love to see a way to have existing widgets available in a list to be used on multiple sidebars.

    • Weston Ruter 9:00 am on September 26, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Regarding the use of the customizer to manage widgets that appear only on select pages (as the ), I think the customizer is not currently displayed prominently enough in WordPress. When you’re looking at a post on the frontend, there should be a Customize link right next to the Edit link in the Admin Bar. Furthermore, when editing a post in the backend, the Preview button should open the post inside of the Customizer, not in a standalone page; the Back (Close/Cancel) button in the Customizer then can just close the window and bring focus back to the window opener. This makes it much snappier to go back to the post edit screen. Also, right now the document title of the customizer does not change based on what is currently being previewed: it always remains just “Customize Twenty Twelve — WordPress”. This is not helpful, and it should dynamically update to include the currently-loaded document title in the preview.

      I’ve put together a plugin which addresses the above wishlist items: https://github.com/x-team/wp-customizer-everywhere

    • Weston Ruter 6:15 am on September 30, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Just released Widget Customizer 0.6: drag-and-drop widgets within customizer panel to preview changes to their ordering! http://wordpress.org/plugins/widget-customizer/

    • Paal Joachim Romdahl 9:54 am on October 5, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Woo Themes have made a very nice plugin: http://wordpress.org/plugins/woosidebars/

  • Mel Choyce 9:25 pm on September 23, 2013 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
    Tags: ,   

    CEUX, Sept 17 Chat Notes 

    Couldn’t make it last week? Check out the chat log.

    Design updates

    This past week, we’ve had some new designs pop up:

    UX feedback is welcome, though keep in mind these are still ideas. We’re looking for big-picture issues. :)

    Getting stuff done

    We’re going to continue to work on smoothing out these ideas, then will need some people to help us prototype them. To help that along, we’ve put together a spreadsheet of tasks. If you’re interested in claiming a task, let me know.

    CEUX Poll

    We’re pretty deep into various design concepts, but I think I want to also take a step back and evaluate what we’ve done so far. Are we on the right track? To help this, I’ve put together a survey:

    Writing Posts in WordPress

    Please take this when you have a moment and share it along. The results will be used to help us figure out if we’re solving the right problems, or if we need to step back and try out some different ideas. It will also help us determine if there are any “quick wins” we can implement prior to adding content blocks.

    Chat is tomorrow, Tuesday the 24th at 17:00 UTC in #wordpress-ui. I’ll be on a plane, so I might not be able to make it, so @joen has agreed to lead in case of my absence.

     

    • mrwweb 11:34 pm on September 23, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      A few thoughts/ideas (and sorry if this has been covered previously).

      1) I can’t help but notice how similar this feels to the Post Formats UI (particularly in iconography). I’m super bummed that that project seems completely abandoned, but should it ever come back to life, thinking about putting these two things together is pretty mind-blowingly confusing.

      2) The UIs where the buttons are in the editor seem clearer that you’re adding content to the body of the post. I think this might be even clearer if you outlined the options in a dotted line to denote the potential for additional content. Here’s a concept that merges some things from a couple of the posted ideas: http://mrwweb.com/wp-ceux/mrw-ceux-concept-092313.jpg To be clear, I make the assumption that the new feature is prominent enough that people will discover it whether or not they understand it at first.

      3) Given the direction of WordPress (and the web), making sure the tool and content layouts themselves are responsive seems very important.

      4) I’ve noticed some concepts have a “Text” block and others don’t. The inclusion of a text block feels a bit confusing to me. If I add an image, for instance, do I have to add a Text block afterwards to continue writing or is text the default state of the editor after a block is added and configured?

      • Diego de Oliveira 12:57 am on September 24, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Hey, mrwweb, nice thoughts! First, I think that the Content Blocks plugin is definitely an evolution of the idea of Post Formats. In my opinion, that’s the initial reason that the mockups and prototypes use the same icons.

        What I like about your concept is that it has an area that looks like a placeholder, and it made clear that it is a place to put something else (content, in this case). Maybe this could be a more intuitive approach.

        About the “Text block”, It is there because we’re still trying to figure out how to deal with content. For example, if we think about blocks like pieces in a grid layout, then I think that every piece of content should be a block, including text. But, if we think about the use of blocks in an “editorial” post with a linear content, for example, then maybe a grid wouldn’t be much necessary, and maybe the use cases of Content Blocks would be more limited. I think that the point of Content Blocks is, in first place, help build any type of content, without depend on a selection of a post format (you can build any format of post, at any place), and, in second place, let the user free of the linear approach of build a page.

      • Joen Asmussen 6:44 am on September 24, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        I really dig your mockup. I think the dotted line may be a tad weighty, but that’s definitely workable. It keeps things clean while still showing recently used blocks on hover. Good job.

        About post formats — the inception of content blocks is to subsume the post format concept altogether. If you only add a single content-block, video for example, that defines your post format.

        • mrwweb 3:41 pm on September 24, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          No problem on the line weight. It was a quick mockup and certainly worth evolving :)

          If you only add a single content-block, video for example, that defines your post format.

          Do you mean that in a literal technical sense or just in the abstract? Would post formats be deprecated if this feature gets into core? What if you mark a post as “Audio” and then put only a “Video” in it? (That wouldn’t make sense, but I don’t think an interface should even allow that type of confusion.)

          • Joen Asmussen 4:45 pm on September 24, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

            There were many reasons for post formats being separated from core. The added UI was one of the reasons. And so part of the genesis of a block-based editor was indeed a yearning for a post formats alternative. So yes I mean that in a technical sense: there’s no reason WordPress can’t add “format-video” as a CSS class to a post that only has video-blocks. So the post format is automatically detected by WordPress based on what blocks you use. It’s not something you pick.

            As always, we’re exploring here. Nothing is set in stone.

    • gregpabst 1:22 pm on September 24, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      These concepts are coming along nicely. I lean more towards @joen‘s concepts as I think having the common content types easily accessible inline would make it easy to add content blocks as you are composing a post. I do appreciate the more robust options and search shown in your and @diegoliv’s wires. The main issue I see with those options is that the common content types aren’t as easy to get to. For example, the search is shown first. Maybe a hybrid could be done where the common content types are shown at the top of the modal or inline with the composed post like the first concepts then the robust modal with additional content types and a search are shown for the “More…” menu.

    • Edouard Duplessis 12:41 pm on September 26, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Did you look guy at what they do on Squarespace http://vimeo.com/45734056, I dont really like the implementation of adding stuff, but for the layout thing, I think it’s pretty nice. It’s like an automatic column layout.

    • Diego de Oliveira 4:53 pm on September 26, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Yeah, It’s pretty awesome! I tested it some weeks ago, and the way that the Squarespace’s editor handles layout is really good. Personally I think that if we could achieve something like that, we would have a powerfull new way to handle content and layout. We just need to figure out how to handle it, and think about the use cases and possible issues.

      We’re still discussing at the CEUX Chat some initial concerns of the project, like the blocks menu UI and the implementation of TinyMCE, but content layout will be probably a discussion we’ll have after we solve this initial challenges.

    • Manuel Schmalstieg 5:17 pm on September 27, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I am extremely excited by all the CEUX prototyping so far. My main comment is pretty close tho what Jen Mylo has been saying (last paragraph).

      In short: I think this is an amazing opportunity for improving the handling content blocks, not only *inside* the main text container, but also extending to several separate content blocks. I am thinking mostly about a picture gallery that sits *above* or *aside* editorial content, rather than being embedded in the body text. This is so far solved by custom meta boxes, or plugins like the (excellent) Advanced Custom Fields.

      It’s a bit lengthy to explain in full, so I wrote a detailed and illustrated post. Waiting for your feedback :)

      • Edouard Duplessis 3:08 am on October 1, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Nice post, I gonna try to make some sketch about it and the best simple way for the user to use this.

      • Steven Jones 2:58 pm on October 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        “I am thinking mostly about a picture gallery that sits *above* or *aside* editorial content, rather than being embedded in the body text”

        I think we need to get away from the thought that the main editor has to exist. Editors (multiple) can fit into the flow of the blocks, whether they are full width or half the page.

    • Paal Joachim Romdahl 2:02 pm on October 7, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

    • Paal Joachim Romdahl 9:27 am on October 14, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

    • Edouard Duplessis 7:52 pm on October 15, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      In my other comments i’ve talked about about some inspiration from Squarespace http://make.wordpress.org/ui/2013/09/23/ceux-sept-17-chat-notes/#comment-23949

      And I’ve seen in the past another cms more lightweight but the implementation of the region is very nice
      http://grabaperch.com/

  • lessbloat 7:57 pm on September 20, 2013 Permalink
    Tags: ,   

    DASH Update 

    Accomplished this week

    1) I updated our planning spreadsheet.

    2) We held our weekly IRC chat last Tuesday. @joen shared:

    Along with the following thoughts:

    • Far right column is for mini widgets. The added whitespace adds balance, centers the middle columns. Is reminiscent of the “Publish” box on the Write section.
    • We pulled back on the ambitions of the activity stream (for 3.8). We still have high hopes of filling out the activity stream with valuable information in a later release.
    • Hooks would be added to the top, middle, and bottom of the activity stream to make it immediately pluggable.

    This mockup solicited the following feedback:

    • Maybe play with a splash of color?
    • Maybe try light or regular font-weight for the big header at the top?
    • Let’s experiment with rotating through different languages/idioms for the header text: aloha, Bienvenido, etc…
    • How about “Site Content” instead of “Right Now”?
    • Can we remove the # of widgets in “Site Content” area?
    • Maybe try one header area with “Recent Activity”, and two sub areas with sub headers, “Publishing Soon”, and “Recent Comments”?

    3) Joen shared the following mockup in our Skype chat:

    4) I uploaded an updated combined news feed patch. Please test this patch out if you have time, or dive in for a code review.

    5) I riffed off of Joen’s latest mockup, and came up with:

    Up next

     

    • mrwweb 10:00 pm on September 20, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      A few thoughts:
      1) I have loved the move to “Quick Drafts” from Day 1. It feels like the main (only?) action-oriented item on the dashboard, and with good reason. When people log in, they should be encouraged to create! So from that standpoint, why not put it in the left column where people’s eyes pass first? This would necessitate moving the Activity Stream to the right, but when I think of other sites with a stream (ala Facebook), they’re frequently on the right. What’s more, the activity stream would seem to have a natural affinity with the “Right Now” widget which is on the right. (I even wonder if the two could merge with a global summary of the site that includes both a broad overview and recent changes)?

      2) Does the WordPress News deserves a big widget or whether it’s more of a mini widget.

      3) Has there been any discussion of adding an “Updates” widget? (Probably a mini-widget.) Many people are terrible at updating it would sure be great to nag them a bit more. A “What’s New” link that goes to each plugin’s/theme’s changelog could also potentially give people a reason to update and make the changelog sound a lot less scary.

      It’s been great to watch this concept develop (for the better even!) and I hope to see the final product work it’s way into core.

    • Ali Shafiee 7:55 am on September 21, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      • Joen Asmussen 2:04 pm on September 22, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Hey that’s pretty nice!

        We’re currently trying to hammer out the scope of the activity stream, making sure we’re ready for 3.8, so the activity stream in the first release may just be a bulked up “Recent Comments” widget with added pending posts. But that’s a nice mockup, I like that style.

    • Paal Joachim Romdahl 10:08 pm on September 22, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Awesome work Lessbloat! The various Core Plugins groups really should follow your example! Make spreadsheets showing progress and where work is needed. It will make it really clear for people wanting to contribute what is still needed to be done. It seems some kind of “template” for running a core plugin group needs to be worked out. Which is clear and to the point for various stages of the development. Regular updates are needed for all the groups so everyone can see what is going on. Backward, stand still or forward progression. Communication is vital for anyone taking part.

    • Manuel Schmalstieg 9:02 am on September 26, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I like the work you’re doing here. But I was really hoping that *recently published* posts would make it into the activity stream. My subjective impression is that, as a blogger, you often want to go back to a recently published item to change a few details. Having a direct link from the dashboard would be top. And in a multi-user setup (team or company site), it’s important to see who did recently publish things.

  • Helen Hou-Sandi 3:02 pm on September 20, 2013 Permalink  

    Update: Media Library Grid View 

    Slowly getting rolling with updates, but after @shaunandrew’s initial proposal, I’ve agreed to lead the plugin for a Media Library Grid View. Our weekly meetings are Fridays at 15:00 UTC in #wordpress-ui. Plugin development will proceed for the time being on GitHub.

    @shaunandrews has also done a couple of screencasts of some experiments:

     

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