Hey, UI gang. Here to help you wind down the week is the latest update to MP6, version 1.2.
We’ve been focusing primarily on solving some of the trickiest responsive questions this week. Some we’ve found solutions to, and some we’re still discussing. We’ve also got a wild idea for the front-end of the site that we’ve got some mockups of to discuss.
Here’s what’s new this week:
- A new position for the “hamburger” button that opens/closes the mobile menu. It’s now part of the adminbar, and stays put when scrolling the rest of the page. There’s a much more obvious active style, and we’ve greatly increased the reliability of the button (no more multiple taps to get it to open anymore!).
- Increased the size of wpadminbar dropdown menus for mobile sizes so that links are easier to tap. (We still need to work on making these easier to close without activating a link).
- Improvements to the media uploader for responsive. Still needs work, but is more functional now.
- Fixed buglets appearing because of Jetpack’s 2x retinafying code interfering with MP6.
- Better positioning of icons in the wpadminbar.
- Improved responsive layout on the Akismet configuration page.
- Added new icon glyphs to the Dashicons font.
- Reworked the way Open Sans is declared in the plugin.
- Fixes to checkboxes and radio buttons.
Once we decided that the adminbar was the best possible place to put the hamburger button for mobile, I started thinking about whether that same interaction might make sense on the desktop version of the dashboard. After all, we’ve already got a button that hides and shows the dashboard, it’s just always been at the bottom of the menu. What if we put it at the top, in the adminbar? The benefit would be that even desktop users would grow to understanding the meaning of the button, since its purpose, hiding or showing the menu, is the same whether you’re on desktop or mobile. If we took it that far, it could even go to the front end of your site; allowing access to any part of your blog’s dashboard within two clicks of your live site. This would be a bigger change than what we can do with just CSS in MP6, so it’s a topic we’re interested in your thoughts on, to see if it’s a good candidate for a potential core patch suggestion.
This week’s edition of MP6 includes contributions from Joen Asmussen, Mel Choyce, Ben Dunkle, Till Krüss, Andy Peatling, and myself. Many thanks, as always, to those of you who have shared your feedback and ideas with us so far. Keep them coming!
We’ll be in #wordpress-ui on Freenode May 20, 2013 at 18:00 UTC to discuss this week’s work; please meet us there if you’d like to chat about what’s new.









Hassan 9:32 pm on May 17, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply
The idea of bringing the admin menu on the frontend (along with the admin bar) is just brilliant, I think.
I don’t know why this never occurred to me before
We need to make it a reality… after heavily testing it, indeed.
Hassan 9:47 pm on May 17, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply
By the way, the update notification bubble is sometimes orange and sometimes blue. Is this intentional or a bug? I prefer the orange; the blue looks a bit wonky when the it’s on a highlighted menu item which is also blue.
mindctrl 12:34 am on May 18, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Looking good. Bringing the admin to the front end is nice. A couple questions though.
1. How much weight is that going to bring to the front end?
2. Will we be able to totally disable that feature via filter/option/something where the weight doesn’t come with it if necessary?
Just a guy 12:58 am on May 18, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I love it!