DASH Plugin Update

Accomplished this week

Some good progress this week.

1) @Joen worked on the following mockup:

2) v0.1 of plugin committed.

3) We held our second IRC chat on Tuesday in #wordpress-ui.

Joen shared his mockup (shown above). There was a bunch of great feedback specific to that mockup. Thanks again to everyone who participated! Here are some high level notes from that conversation.

  • Putting the “Content” part of “Right Now” into a fixed footer didn’t fly. I’ve explored alternatives, and I’m in fact leaning towards ditching the entire thing.
  • The vertical separator which is a slider didn’t look draggable, and it looked like a fancy scrollbar.
  • The icon styling wasn’t WordPressy enough
  • Explore alternative stylings for the “cards”
  • Show only the activity we actually have access to right now
  • Explore the notion that we know which parts of the “Activity stream” are new compared to your last visit (hence the “Welcome back” text)

4) @dbernar1 (Dan) did some clean up on my initial pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party commit

5) Dan started work on merging QuickPress and Recent Drafts.

6) Joen worked on another mockup:

  • New card style with rounded corners and a soft shadow.
  • No icons, they weren’t really helping.
  • “3 new comments since your last visit” and “recent comments” — they’re part of the same screen. I imagine this. A fresh dash says “Howdy”, and we set a cookie time. Recent Comments takes up all the space under “publishing soon”. Next time you visit (day++), the dash says “Welcome back”. Comments that trickled in over night now show up.
  • The 3 dot draggability slider indicator is now at the top of the separator.

7) I created a new trac ticket requesting a temporary hook be added to simplify our QuickPress & Recent Draft widgetWidget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user. merge.

Where we need help

  • We need someone with commit access to get the temporary hook that I mentioned above added (see #7 above). This is a blocker for us, so it would be great if we could get this added ASAP.
  • I’d love some feedback on my combined RSS feed patch.
  • We’d love some feedback on Joen’s latest mockup (#6 above)
  • We’ve still got a pretty small crew. If any of this looks interesting to you, please pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” me on IRC (lessbloat). We’ve got a side-channel Skype room where we’re discussing a bunch of stuff related to this project. Just let me know, and I’ll get you added to the room.

Up next

#dash