Post Formats UI Update, 1/31
Had really good conversations in Wednesday’s dev chat and continued in today’s office hours. Seems like we’ve got a really good direction. All the UI will be available all the time and theme support for individual formats will shift to serving as a flag for whether or not the theme handles format-specific data for display. If a format is not explicitly supported by the theme, there should be simple, semantic fallback output that can be hooked on to the_content. This allows the admin UI to stay consistent and able to offer data fields that don’t just disappear into nothingness, and themes can actually support post formats with just styling rather than handling format-specific data themselves.
@beaulebens is working on the fallback output on #23347, and @sabreuse is joining @rachelbaker to work on the edit form and switcher on #19570. @melchoyce has updated wireframes she’ll be linking to in a comment here. TBD: no-JS treatment, will also need to be keeping an eye on accessibility.
Also, user testing was done with core as-is, and I’ve got videos to watch and analyze for post formats using Crowd Favorite’s UI and fallback code. These are extremely revealing and are really helping us identify pain points as well as setting a baseline for measuring any improvements we hope to make.
Erlend Sogge Heggen 7:44 am on February 1, 2013 Permalink
Will the post formats update include any work towards making post formats more usable via the front-end? I really love the idea of bbPress being able to use post formats to distinguish between normal posts and support posts for instance, as well as its own take on link posts and so forth.
Beau Lebens 2:14 pm on February 1, 2013 Permalink
The list of core-supported post formats will be (currently):
There are no plans to allow plugins/themes to modify that list
Erlend Sogge Heggen 5:02 am on February 4, 2013 Permalink
So I suppose that means we won’t be able to easily create a post format like, say, “Forum Link” to mimic the Facebook style link posts with autoembedding? Too bad, I was really excited about the possibilities there.
Helen Hou-Sandi 9:35 am on February 4, 2013 Permalink
Post formats already exists as an enumerated list and that will not be changing. In your cited example, not sure why a “Link” format post wouldn’t work.
Mel Choyce 12:21 pm on February 1, 2013 Permalink
Updated wireframes: http://cl.ly/0p260s3U0L3p
Justin Tadlock 12:33 am on February 2, 2013 Permalink
As a user, I hope there’ll be an easy way (via plugin if need be) to continue using things like post titles for “asides” since this is the way I’ve been doing them for the past 6+ years. Some people use titles and some people don’t. Personally, I like to have the title shown on the singular view.
As a theme developer, I just want to ask that we make it easy to open any hidden fields back up without having to jump through hoops to do it, especially for those of us who have been using those fields in our themes. A simple filter hook or something like that would do it.
Helen Hou-Sandi 12:54 am on February 2, 2013 Permalink
One of the things I’ve been thinking about suggesting (hadn’t gotten there yet) was that title always be editable, even if for some formats it’s more buried.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by hidden fields?
Justin Tadlock 5:58 am on February 2, 2013 Permalink
Any hidden fields that represent normal
post_fieldnamedata such as the title field. I’m not sure if there are any others, but the title is the biggie.I definitely agree that the title should always be editable, especially because it’s the
<title>element on a page and is what’s used to populate the permalink field. I like the wireframe of the chat format where it says “Chat Title (optional)”. I think that’d be a good use for the aside and status formats too.Synapticism 10:57 pm on February 2, 2013 Permalink
I was mucking about with the quote post format on my personal blog and ended up writing some thoughts about usage that may be of interest to the team. Here are the links:
http://synapticism.com/working-with-wordpress-post-formats-and-quotations/
http://synapticism.com/marking-up-quotations-with-html5/
My main point: adding a third field, “source title”, to the quote post format will encourage HTML5 best practices.
I’m no expert in these things so there might be something really terrible about this idea that I wouldn’t have thought of
Andrew Nacin 11:32 pm on February 2, 2013 Permalink
Great research and post, thanks.