Welcome screen design v2

I’d like to get the ball rolling on the new welcome screen redesign for 3.5. I started playing around with a few ideas and I’d love to hear your thoughts:

My hope for this screen is that it will serve as a proper “home” that users can come back to again and again to find anything they need in the admin. As I mentioned here, this was a big stumbling blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. for each of the users we tested.

A couple of notes:

  • All of the copy and links are super generic, and need work.
  • You’ll notice the addition of tabs to the dashboard. My thought was that new users would be taken to this “Welcome” tab just after install. If they clicked the “dashboard” tab, we’d save that to the DB via AJAX, and on refresh, you’d still be on the dashboard tab.
  • On the right you’ll see the “viewing” drop down. My hope is to make the entire welcome tab extensibleExtensible This is the ability to add additional functionality to the code. Plugins extend the WordPress core software., so that you could add your own custom screen (set of links, and quick links) as an option. This dropdown would only show if you’ve added your own welcome screen option.
  • You of course should be able to easily hide the “welcome” tab (if you wish) through a hook. As well as having hooksHooks In WordPress theme and development, hooks are functions that can be applied to an action or a Filter in WordPress. Actions are functions performed when a certain event occurs in WordPress. Filters allow you to modify certain functions. Arguments used to hook both filters and actions look the same. anywhere else they make sense.
  • The “What are you trying to do” text box should suggest links as you type – similar to the idea here. I will note that while there are 1000 things that we could add to this auto-suggest dropdown, I’d prefer to just focus on adding links to functionality within the admin for the 3.5 release (and really making that experience solid).
  • The “Quick links” bar would be links to the most used sections of the admin (for new users). I was hoping we could find a nice library of open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. vector icons to use there.

Here’s the balsamiq source file if you’ve got some ideas based on this wireframe: http://cl.ly/1K3R2u383f28

This is all still very rough, and I expect that we’ll go through a couple rounds of iteration before we get it right. Thoughts?