Summary of May 6 Meeting
Q & A with Justin Shreve about his Ideas & Feedback Theme project which was accepted for GSoC. (Congrats!)
Abstract:
http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/student_project/show/google/gsoc2010/wordpress/t127230764519
Previous Discussion: http://make.wordpress.org/ui/2010/04/01/better-ideas-so-to-speak/
- GSOC officially starts May 24
- Working on the functional specs
- Now is a good time for feedback on features
- Sites with similar functionality (for inspiration): Ubuntu BrainStorm, Dell IdeaStorm, UserVoice
- He will be using the wp-ui mailing list for specific tasks and other help.
- We’ll primarily use the mailing list to request help and for specific tasks.
- … more specifics will be coming in the next few weeks.
This week’s challenge::
Better alternatives to the orange from the update notifications for themes/plugins. Blue/gray has been suggested as an alternative. Post mockups and suggestions here.
Tracy Cannon 6:22 pm on May 7, 2010 Permalink
Current Update Color: #D54E21
Current Screenshots:
http://flic.kr/p/7Zmsij
http://flic.kr/p/7ZifAt
JohnONolan 12:43 pm on May 9, 2010 Permalink
Here’s one from me, didn’t feel that the blue was working as it didn’t stand out – so went for a few alternatives.
http://twitpic.com/1meikk/full
Jane Wells 3:19 pm on May 20, 2010 Permalink
I think the middle orange (pending comments) looks the best with the blue, and the fact that we use it elsewhere to indicate pending status is something I like (your plugins are pending update, etc). The question comes down to whether the number indicator should feel be more like a prompt that something is waiting for you or more like an alert message.
holdenc 2:22 am on May 13, 2010 Permalink
This is a difficult one because the orange is the perfect complimentary colour to the blue that is the default. There are a lot of colour that would look good, but some also vibrate on the grey. Something like a rgb(178,68,116), a nice purplish pink with a good contrast to the grey, or rgb(197,0,0) would go great with a small white accent (drop-shadow with a border bottom fallback) around it so the colours don’t vibrate together too much.
holdenc 2:08 pm on May 14, 2010 Permalink
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7647992@N07/4606016127/ <- Purple
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7647992@N07/4606631404/ <- Red
Tracy Cannon 6:19 pm on May 13, 2010 Permalink
Some more options
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1302/4604629418_a7affa9297_o.png
Norman 1:31 pm on May 15, 2010 Permalink
Whats wrong with the orange? Its one of WordPress’ brand colors and it works beautifully.
irishmark 3:25 pm on May 18, 2010 Permalink
I agree – nowt wrong with a bit of orange.
holdenc 6:53 pm on May 18, 2010 Permalink
This was my point. I think the orange should stay!
JohnONolan 9:57 am on May 20, 2010 Permalink
Hi Norman, the specific orange which you’re referring to is left over from WordPress 2.5 – it doesn’t actually appear anywhere else in the UI so we’re trying some different options to bring it up to speed and keep it consistent.
Ivor Padilla 7:01 pm on May 19, 2010 Permalink
In the menu section this line needs ‘overflow:hidden;’.
#menu-management .menu-edit {
margin-bottom:20px;
*overflow:hidden;*
}
Spencer Lavery 1:32 am on May 21, 2010 Permalink
A variant of grey as per the Dashboard sub-section update notification would also work well.
A major concern with the current orange is that it can appear alarming, and with the rate that plugins are updated recently, a WP installation running 10-20 plugins requires updating a few times per week. This can give the impression to client-deployed WP installations that the site is constantly in need of ‘fixing’, and leave them with a general feeling that the site may be unstable or broken in some way.
An alternative would be to develop a hook to distinguish between security/critical updates (could be displayed with an orange/red badge) and non-critical updates (could be displayed with a grey). Although, obviously, plugin updates should never really be ‘critical’, and if that’s the case a sole grey colour would in terms of UX be more semantic.
Jane Wells 1:54 am on May 21, 2010 Permalink
I think we’re going to go with the milder orange that use elsewhere in the admin to indicate ‘pending’ status. I agree that we need color standardization based on types. We talked about this in today’s UI chat, and will be working toward that.
JohnONolan 11:39 am on May 21, 2010 Permalink
I like the idea of colours to indicate severity of the update – let’s definitely have a chat about that one when we come to 3.1 task discussions