DASH Update

It’s been a couple of weeks. We’ve been heads down getting stuff done.

So, where are we at?

Here’s the existing dashboard:

Here’s what our new dashboard looks like:

What’s changed?

We removed one 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.:

  • Incoming links (which doesn’t really work anymore)

We combined several widgets:

  • “WordPress Blog”, “Other WordPress News”, and “Plugins” as combined to form the new “WordPress News” 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.
  • “Recent Comments” was merged into the new “Activity” widget, which now also shows you any scheduled posts and your last 5 most recently published posts.
  • “QuickPress” was changed to “Quick Drafts”, and we merged in “Recent Drafts”.

Plus we worked on a few additional things:

  • The Right Now widget was simplified.
  • We removed the “Number of columns” screen option. Instead the dashboard is now responsive, and shows the appropriate number of columns based on your screen resolution.
  • We replaced the “Dashboard” H2 title with a fun group of friendly welcome text and idioms.
  • The new “Activity” widget will be hookable, so plugin authors can easily add additional info to it.
  • There’s a fun little smiley if you delete all posts and comments

What’s left?

  • Code reviews. If you have time over the weekend, please look over our code. If you spot something, and need commit access to the plugin, just 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 in IRC. I’ll be doing a code review of my own (but I’m not a PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php. developer, so we could still use your help). We’d like to have this code coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.-ready by Monday.
  • We still need to write new help tab text for each of these dashboard widget changes.
  • I’ll be adding the “Activity” widget 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. this weekend.

Huge thanks!

Major props to @joen, @ryelle, @dbernar1, @kraftbj, and @tillkruess without whom, this plugin would not exist.

Also big props to @helen, @melchoyce, @samuelsidler, Hassan Hisham, and Valerio Al Kalib for helping out along the way.

#dash