Feature Plugin: Improving Image Editing

Image editing in WordPress isn’t fun. It’s possible, but it isn’t fun. Bringing image editing into the media modal was pretty awesome. Now people can edit images from the modal (yay!) but they also realise how frustrating that image editing experience is (boo 🙁 ).

WordPress is not an image editing platform, but we do offer some minimal image editing tools and, since they’re there, they should be intuitive instead of anger inducing.

Image editing is an area that’s ripe for improvement, so we are proposing an image editing feature pluginFeature Plugin A plugin that was created with the intention of eventually being proposed for inclusion in WordPress Core. See Features as Plugins. to see how we can improve things.

At the WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Seattle contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/., myself, @sonjanyc, @mor10 and @DH-Shredder started some discussions about how we can improve the image editing experience in WordPress. Below is what we discussed:

What we want to provide to users

  • a set of simple image editing tools that just work (crop, rotate, scale)
  • image editing tools that integrate better with image uploading workflows
  • image editing tools that are easy to access
  • an interface that is extensibleExtensible This is the ability to add additional functionality to the code. Plugins extend the WordPress core software. so that 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 developers can create advanced image editing which can be easy integrated

Process
We discussed the process for the way forward with the project:
1. Creating personas and workflows
2. Conducting interviews with user types (photoblogger, food blogger, tutorial writer, multi-author blog editor, etc)
3. Looking at how other platforms provide image editing functionality
4. UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. mockups
5. Design
6. Coding
7. Testing

Tickets related to image editing

And here are some mockups that were done around 3.5 from @lessbloat

If anyone would like to be involved in this project, please let us know. We have a Skype group and we can start kicking off weekly meetings, either in IRC or Google Hangouts. It’s in the very early stages and we’re planning to take things slowly since we all have other commitments, but we can get things moving more quickly if with more involvement.

Here are some things you could help out with:

  • conducting user interviews and writing up the research
  • researching other platforms, writing it up, providing screenshots
  • mocking up workflows
  • mocking up the UI
  • designing the interface
  • coding like a boss
  • coding like a backbone boss
  • user testing
  • feedback, insight, rants, cheerleading

You can email me to be added to the Skype group or let us know in the comments

#feature-plugins, #image-editing, #image-flow