WordPress 3.6: Distraction-Free Writing improvements
Distraction-Free Writing (DFW) made its debut in WordPress 3.2. It’s good, but it has some problems:
- It’s hard to discover. A tiny button that doesn’t stand out from other buttons.
- The transition is a bit jarring. Your content goes away, you land on another screen, and your content reappears. It feels like there is a cost to switching.
- It isn’t as fully-featured as it should be. If it isn’t capable of easily (and by that I, I mean without keyboard shortcuts) doing the majority of the formatting people need to do while writing, people are going to be disinclined to use it.
- It could use some polish. Some of the interactions are janky, and it’s not very responsive to large screens. There are strange issues that happen when you get to the end of a line or do a line break near the bottom of the editor. The Esc key doesn’t work when in TinyMCE. Lots of little stuff like that.
What I need is someone with CSS skills and JS competency to take on a bunch of little improvement projects for DFW. If you have those skills and care about making a beautiful and functional distraction-free writing experience for WordPress, speak up!
Chris Wallace 9:08 pm on January 8, 2013 Permalink
I’d like to help if you need me to.
Andy Stratton 9:08 pm on January 8, 2013 Permalink
I’m interested and would like to get an idea of the list fo things to be done (CSS/JS). I’ll probably try to get @bmoredrew to help me too – anything we have competency and time to do I’m interested.
bmoredrew 9:31 pm on January 8, 2013 Permalink
I’m down!
Jeff Bowen 9:11 pm on January 8, 2013 Permalink
I don’t have the bandwidth to lead this, but I’d love to pitch in
ckhicks 9:11 pm on January 8, 2013 Permalink
I’d be happy to help explore current/popular trends in DFW environments and provide research, if needed. This is one of my favorite WP 3+ features, and it is prime real estate for greatness!
Eric Mann 9:16 pm on January 8, 2013 Permalink
I’d love to help, though it would be useful if we had a concise list of all of the “janky” interactions so we know what we’re committing to.
Zach "The Z Man" Abernathy 9:17 pm on January 8, 2013 Permalink
I’m on board to help with this. And I agree with Eric Mann. A playbook on what we’re committing to would be great.
Mel Choyce 9:49 pm on January 8, 2013 Permalink
Not a terrible amount of js competency, but I’ve got css skills and would like to help out with this.
Slobodan Manic 7:56 pm on January 9, 2013 Permalink
Similar skillset and would love to help with this one.
There was probably talk about it already, but would moving full-screen button away from other buttons make sense? Perhaps next to Visual/Text tabs? Those two change the editor, so does full screen toggle.
theaccordance 10:01 pm on January 8, 2013 Permalink
I completely agree with your assessment. The moment I found that the DFW toolbar lacked the ability to select headings I walked away from the Distraction-Free view; this is certainly something I’d like to see an improvement with.
I just reviewed the full-screen views for a few apps on my Mac (which provide a similar experience to DF view), and with the exception of the top toolbar, the visual interactions remain fairly consistent. Would it be appropriate to approach the DF view in a similar fashion?
Also, should consideration be given in DFW for additional functionality added to the normal TinyMCE via plugins?
(Apologies if I should be bringing these questions up in a different location, I’m new and still getting acquainted with working on the core.)
adamsilverstein 10:18 pm on January 8, 2013 Permalink
i’m in.
John Blackbourn (johnbillion) 3:37 am on January 9, 2013 Permalink
Related: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/22185
Mark Jaquith 3:48 am on January 10, 2013 Permalink
As we have a lot of people willing to help, but none willing and confident to lead, and as this seems to be the least-well-defined of the features on the docket, it has been dropped as a scheduled feature and will instead be handled as the grab-bag of improvements that it is. I’ll work on getting it broken out into individual tasks and anyone interested should keep an eye out for “DFW” on Trac.
Robert Chapin (miqrogroove) 7:56 pm on January 14, 2013 Permalink
Hi Mark, a less prominent yet important disadvantage of DFW is the lack of cross platform compatibility. iPad and other device support ahould be considered.