Make WordPress UI

Updates from April, 2013 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Mark Jaquith 3:52 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink
    Tags: post format ui   

    @saracannon has posted her take on a new direction for post format UI, addressing some of the concerns that surfaced after @lessbloat‘s tests. Re-thinking WordPress Post Format UI.

    The one that is closest to what I was thinking, and the best balance between showing the new UI (to people who are already using post formats or who have a theme with special support), and getting it out of the way once you’ve chosen, is the “In Page decision with post editor greyed out” one.

    post-formats-classic-i-copy-1024x698

    I’m curious to know what the UI team thinks. I’d like action taken on this ASAP, so that we can get the UI settled for beta 2.

     

    • Terry Sutton 3:59 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      The modal doesn’t feel quite right to me. A) So many sites are adding those ultra-annoying modals, and It would feel a little like that to me, and B) with the exception of the Media modal, i feel like it doesn’t fit with the current UI direction. It’s very well done, so I don’t want to sound too critical, but it doesn’t feel quite right to me.

    • Mel Choyce 4:01 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Was just about to post this below, but I guess it belongs here now:

      I love these explorations! I know we don’t want increase the barrier between thought and post, but I do think that by choosing to write a post, you’re already making a decision. I like that we’re prompting users into action by making them decide on a post format. I wish we could test this with a selection of .org users, who might have different goals and behaviors than .com and tumblr users.

      Going on to the individual exploration, I’m not a huge fan of modals — especially since they never seem to act correctly on a small screen — but I can see them being a handy solution here. What would happen if someone automatically closes the modal, though?

      Overall, I agree with Mark — I definitely think #2 is the right direction. It makes a lot of sense to me, especially since it’s bringing you to the right screen and prompting you for action without the distraction a modal window might have. It helps directly reinforces how your decision effects what you’re posting. With a modal, there’s a little bit of a disconnect between what you choose and how that changes what you see.

      Building on this, I can also envision a setting that allows you to set your default post format, which would highlight your default when you land on the new post page and have the others greyed out. Alternately, we could do the selected/default icon in color and leave the others b+w. Power users, people who just post one type of content, or even professionals creating sites for clients could set defaults or disable formats entirely, and I think #2s method would make any of those changes easier.

      • Mark Jaquith 4:08 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        So I was thinking that if you clicked into the post editor or title, it’d select Standard and let you go on your way. Just like before. And we could give focus to the post title, and select standard if you just started typing a title. Again, just like before. So this way you can’t miss the new UI, but you can also just skip past it when you just want to start composing.

    • esmi 4:09 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      The perennial issue with modal windows is ensuring that they are fully accessible to those using screen reading software or those who don’t use a mouse. Ensuring this level of accessibility can put a lot of additional strain on the UI devs. Is that really something you want to impose at this stage of the game?

      • Mark Jaquith 4:13 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        I’m not advocating that we use a modal. I agree with your concerns (and have more of my own). See above comments. Updated post with screenshot to be clear about the approach I was talking about.

    • sara cannon 4:13 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      The greyed out area can also surface and choose “standard” as a format when clicked / tapped

    • Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 4:17 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Would it still be possible to switch between? Sometimes I change my mind, and one thing I HATE about how Tumblr does it is that I have to totally start over :/ I Even if there was a warning that any standard specific content would be lost, the main part of the post below I’d like to keep.

      • Chip Bennett 4:19 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Looks like the sidebar meta box is retained – or, is rolled into the Publish meta box, as a dropdown or radio select.

      • sara cannon 4:20 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Yes, in the publish meta box there will be a switcher. I also think this is essential

        • Terry Sutton 4:53 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          So I’m clear — the switcher won’t stay above the post title as it is now in Beta1? IE: the icon bar will go away after you’ve made your choice?

          • Mark Jaquith 4:59 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

            That’s the idea. Big and up top on first load. Tucked away once you’ve chosen (either explicitly or implicitly). Addresses the two big issues we’re having in beta 1: not obvious enough before choosing, in the way after choosing.

            • sara cannon 5:00 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink

              and resolves any potential confusion for users that might think they can use all the buttons/formats on one post

            • Terry Sutton 5:06 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink

              Ok. In that case, I’m split on the idea of it going away to a metabox, or staying above the post title as it does in Beta1. So after you’ve chosen which post type, here’s what you see: http://cl.ly/image/2g1f3o2D3m1U

            • Brian Richards 5:36 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink

              I can’t decide whether or not I’d like for the UI to disappear completely after choosing my post format. I do like the notion of “putting it out of the way”, but what happens if I’ve accidentally clicked/tapped the wrong format and wanted to quickly click/tap on a different one — is the UI only removed after I begin entering content?

              I know from the explanation that the UI just gets moved into the Publish metabox, but it’s unlikely I would know or expect this behavior otherwise.

              The alternative of keeping it in place (and dimming the unselected choices) doesn’t sound like a great solution either because, as already discussed, it stays in the way and could lead to later confusion about the purpose of the buttons (e.g. “is this how I add a link to my post?”).

              Tough call…

    • Chip Bennett 4:17 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      +1 to “In Page decision with post editor greyed out. Icons will go away and the “switching” will be in the sidebar like above.” It looks great, and appears to be a huge improvement to what we have now (3.5.1 and 3.6 beta 1).

      -(Eleventy Frillion) to a modal.

    • Robert Dall 5:06 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      OMG you are awesome @saracannon I loved how you covered all the bases here… A couple comments.

      The Modal system as @AndyPeatling put it on twitter. “Not sure forcing the UX would be well received for dot org though. Most don’t care or use them.”

      The Post format switching as a radio button would to far to long leading pushing the category, tags, feature image to push them lower in the window.

      Icons with Text +10,000 looks awesome!
      One comment regarding the icons getting greyed out on the hover is it is opposite of the hover state in the admin menu on the left. We should keep the standard hover over icons the same through out the admin section of the site.

      Can we choose icons only or text only or both like Apple offers in there mail application? It seems that would suite the best of both worlds.

    • Tom Auger 5:08 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Really love this new direction. The in-your-face visual icons really bring this often-underused part of the post to the front.

      My only comment is – does the editor really need to be greyed out? Should we not just default to “Standard” and then let the user switch it up from there. I can just see a ton of bloggers who don’t currently use post formats get really annoyed when we add another click to the process.

      • Robert Dall 5:15 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        I see your point most bloggers will choose the standard post… It beta1 it already chooses standard by default and I think we should keep it that :-)

      • sara cannon 5:19 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Mark pointed out above that we will still have the title field focused like normal – so start typing like normal and there is no extra “click” and standard is chosen for you

    • Ryan Cowles 5:38 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Awesome work, Sara! These concepts look rad.

      While I don’t have much to say in regards to the UI itself, I think this part is important: “you can turn all post formats off from within core settings to override what your theme set. ”

      If a new step in the post creation flow is introduced that forces the user to select a post format, I think the user should be allowed to disable it. Therefore users that only use one post format aren’t forced to go through an unnecessary step each time a new post is created. Just my $0.02.

    • Helen Hou-Sandi 6:04 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I think this is a good compromise between representing the “choose once” part and not blocking users from just writing a new post as they currently can. What’s currently in trunk definitely does not reflect that it’s (generally) a one-time format selection before you get started. I think with smart wording in the feature pointer letting the user know that they can turn this off in screen options in addition to the filter that’s already been committed, it will work out okay.

      Question about the “just start typing to make a standard post” interaction, though – what happens to the switcher? Does it disappear and cause everything to shift up while the user is typing? That seems less than ideal to me.

    • Chip Bennett 6:09 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Crazy thought: what if the big ol’ post format icons were stacked vertically, to the left of the post editor (i.e. a third column on the post-edit screen)?

      Still have the everything-grayed-out-before-selection UI, but then let the icons remain where they are after selection.

      That would allow for easy switching, and would not cause the UI to jump around with appearing-then-disappearing icons above the post editor.

    • thirzah 6:13 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      (random person chips in) Love it – but minor thought – if they are at the top, and (what looks likely to be) more meta boxes pushing post/data entry ever downwards, would it be possible to make the ‘publish’ box pinnable, or copied at the bottom, or something? – Yours, Lazy Scroller :)

    • sara cannon 6:19 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      For responsive screens, we can wrap the icons. because they will be eliminated after choice – we don’t have to worry about real estate

      980: ​​http://s.sar.ac/image/3B2H2v0P1841
      768 ​Option 1: http://s.sar.ac/image/1D1e002x2i0X (5 across slightly spread out)
      768 Option 2: http://s.sar.ac/image/2a3u3v3E3p03 (5 across slightly spread out & centered)

    • nathanrice 6:30 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I have some deeper issues with the new Post Formats, but first let me say that I like the idea of a “decision first” approach with the ability to change in the publish box. Makes a lot of sense to me, and doesn’t clutter the post UI with buttons. It’s a little out of the way, which may have UX implications, but the initial decision path more than makes up for that.

      As for the Post Formats strategy itself, I’m troubled by the decision to turn this feature on by default. From reading through a few trac tickets, I can see the logic behind why this decision was made, but it still seems like it’s going to be a bit of a shock, especially to theme developers who may not see this coming, and certainly to users who will now have a UI that their theme isn’t at all prepared for.

      If this is the wrong place for this discussion, please tell me where I can go to bring this up with the powers that be. I’d like to understand the rationale if there was no other alternative, but otherwise, I’d like to see if there isn’t a better alternative than what we’ve got currently. And if my initial assumption is incorrect, I apologize.

    • Hal Gatewood 6:39 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Rough potential tabbed idea… http://goo.gl/143Zu

    • Drew Jaynes (DrewAPicture) 7:40 pm on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I really like this concept a lot better. Plus, there’s parity with the hide/show overlays we used in the menus UI refresh.

      The thing I’ve consistently heard from talking to people about the new formats UI is that an intermediary choice step would solve a lot of the headaches and I think take this approach over what we have now will be a big step in the right direction.

    • Archetyped 4:18 am on April 12, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      “In Page decision with post editor greyed out” seems like the best option as others have noted.

      I agree with @markjaquith that clicking the title/description fields should automatically select the default post format and close the selection UI, however, I would suggest it be even a bit more flexible than that. I would suggest that clicking anywhere outside of the “post format selection UI” should automatically select the default post format (e.g. standard post) and close the post format selection bar just as if someone had selected the format itself. This allows for a much larger hit target for the user to get to the editor and start creating content without much delay.

      I think it was also suggested that the post format selection UI go away immediately if the user starts typing in the title field (focused by default). I like this as well.

      In addition, how about an option in WP’s settings to allow the user/author to set the default post format. The editor fields for the selected post format’s would be displayed by default when creating new posts and the appropriate button would be highlighted in the post format selection UI.

      This would be a productivity boost for users who post mostly videos, or mostly links, or mostly status messages, etc.

      • sara cannon 4:53 am on April 12, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        “I would suggest that clicking anywhere outside of the “post format selection UI” should automatically select the default post format ” — yes! I’m not sure if this was mentioned in the above threads but this is definitely something that should be included.

        @melchoyce also has mentioned the idea of setting a default post format in a comment above. I think that idea should definitely be explored further and is a logical next step. Part of why I think this is – we have ten formats with no hierarchy for preference.

    • Grant Palin 6:48 am on April 12, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I generally dislike popups, modal or otherwise, when they are not really necessary. I could have made an exception in this case since the choice it would provide would determine the appropriate UI. It’s something that kinda needs to be done up-front.

      That said, it’s still a jarring change, and the better option may be the row of icons above the editor, which maybe shrinks or fades when a choice is made in order to stay out of the way. At least it’s top and center that way.

    • Avryl 11:24 am on April 12, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I don’t really get the concept of selecting a post format. All post formats do more or less the same, you can add media, add a title, add a description/content. Why not just have one and detect what’s posted?

      Or maybe, have two buttons in the media uploader, one “insert in post” and one “make an image post”, same for a gallery, video and audio. When the user adds a link to the content, give the option to make a link post. Maybe this would be more obvious if there’s an “add link” button next the “add media” button or by somehow integrating them both in TinyMCE. A status post can be created if there’s no title.

      I’m just wondering, but what happens when a user inserts an image into the content of a standard post format and nothing else? Then that would be an image post right? Maybe it’s possible to detect if the user assigns the “wrong” post format, as in the UI test?

    • jrbeilke 2:45 pm on April 12, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Nicely done Sara. I also prefer the in-page decision for post formats and think it stands out more than the current beta UI without being too obtrusive.

      I am concerned about all of the new decisions that a writer will be faced with when adding a new post. At a minimum the screen options/theme support should help to control the available post formats. Defaulting to a standard post when no selection is made would also streamline the process for those that want to stick with their current workflow.

      Another issue that I’ve run into while testing is the admin Posts screen, and posts without a title. It would be nice to tweak the Posts screen to show a snippet from the post if no title has been set. Maybe it’s just me, but with some of these new post formats (ie Aside and Status) a title isn’t necessary, but makes administration difficult without it.

      Posts without titles – http://i.imgur.com/M40SwIR.jpg
      Mockup Posts with snippets – http://i.imgur.com/WtwfSnt.jpg

      • Konstantin Kovshenin 2:46 pm on April 12, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Related/possible solution: #24011

        • jrbeilke 3:09 pm on April 12, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          Thanks, didn’t see that ticket.

          Looks like it might work, but if it’s tied into save_post then what if there are already existing posts without titles? Will the user have to go through and re-save all of the posts that are missing a title?

    • Matt Mullenweg 8:10 pm on April 14, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Also as food for thought: we’re supporting too many formats. Anything where you’re giving a user 10 choices before they get started is going to be rough from a usability and design perspective, especially given it’s not really obvious what that choice does not just to the form, but to the post when it’s published.

      There is some direct and indirect data about which formats are most used, perhaps we could apply our 80/20 principle to just supporting the 3-4 formats that would make the biggest difference to users.

      • Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 3:49 am on April 15, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        What if you consolidate?

        Image and Gallery – Make it one, and if someone puts in an image, it shows just one. If it’s a gallery code, or they attach mulitple images, then use a gallery? To steal a page from Tumblr, that’s how they do it.

        You could do the same for audio/video maybe. Though that would be harder to theme in both cases.

        • sara cannon 10:51 pm on April 16, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          ^ I really like this solution – we just use the format “image” in the UI, but then when a user attaches more than one, it automatically makes it the “gallery” format in the background (no need to manually switch). It solves a UX problem where someone might decide to upload more than one after-the fact. (image->gallery is really one of the main use cases for decision-changing that I foresee)

      • Mark Jaquith 12:46 pm on April 15, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        The formats have been defined in code and in the codex for a while, so dropping some formats would result in data loss for some.

        One thing that has been considered is hiding less-used formats, so that instead of 10 options, you might have 5 options and a “more” button.

      • Ian Stewart 3:21 pm on April 15, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        +1 for hiding seldom used formats.

      • Andy Peatling 5:09 pm on April 18, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        I posted usage stats for frontend WordPress.com posting here: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/19570#comment:154

    • chabis 10:32 pm on April 17, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      There needs to be some careful rethinking about the post formats. two assumptions:

      A. many users want to create a post with a single content (gallery, audio, image, etc) and a post format is fine for that.
      B. many other user want to create a post that contains an image, a text, another image, then a video, etc.

      Now how do you make clear to the user that A. is not equal to B.? A. is a complete view change from a Post to a Gallery whereas B. is a Post with multiple content elements.

      In my point of view, and as mentioned before, the user gets confused by post-formats and the icons. Especially the icons can me users think that they need to click on the format to insert a media. And at the same time the decision hurdle is too high, maybe a user changes its mind during the editing process, what do you do then?

      Maybe we need to think about the editor in a slightly different way. It should be intelligent enough to make assumptions with the added and future content. The text-editor of koken.me is just a wonderful inspiration for that:

      http://help.koken.me/customer/portal/articles/632095-text

      • Anointed 6:37 pm on April 21, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        WOW, just WOW, that koken admin is SWEET! Especially the media manager. thnx for the link, not sure I would have ever found it on my own. Really gives the WordPress media manager something to aim for.

    • Anointed 6:34 pm on April 21, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Not sure where to make this request, but this seems as good a place as any.

      I actually like the new post-formats setup, especially the video format where the actual player shows up on the page after clicking publish. This makes it so much easier to understand what is happening and to make sure the video oEmbed url works and you have the right video.

      My only request, is it would be nice to have the video player display PRIOR to clicking publish.

      Right now, we are able to make sure we have everything else right prior to publishing, but cool as this new player showing up is, we still don’t know that everything is perfect prior to publish as we can’t see the player.

      So, please make the player show up as soon as the oEmbed url/embed code/etc is inputted into the box.

  • Matt Thomas 7:38 pm on March 15, 2013 Permalink
    Tags:   

    MP6 version 0.3 

    Thank goodness it’s Friday! Because Friday means it’s time for an update to MP6. As we’ve mentioned before, this is not intended for the general public, just for savvy WordPress enthusiasts eager to preview or contribute to a re-imagination of our collective home, wp-admin.

    On Monday we met on IRC in #wordpress-ui to discuss feedback on last week’s iteration. We’ve taken that feedback, plus the comments left here on this P2, into account in what we’ve done this week. Here’s what’s new:

    • Almost all icons are now served from the Dashicons font. Work continues on the remaining raster icons.
    • The Plugins page now has borders and more padding between rows in the table. Opacity is only used for text, so their checkboxes stay fully opaque.
    • .widefat tables, .postbox divs and other containers have a deeper drop shadow and a new header design that more clearly defines the container from the background, and the header from the rest of the element.
    • Folded menus now get a small arrow for the current section. The way the arrow appears/disappears with the submenu isn’t great; if we remove the delay on submenus this might not be an issue.
    • The tabbed style of the Appearance section header has been removed.
    • The WordPress logo on the About page is now an SVG.
    • Page headers are now regular instead of light weight.
    • Admin color options are hidden when MP6 is present, as the plan is to only ship with one color scheme (though it will be even easier than before to customize your own).
    • The new comments/updates notification bubble is now #d54e21 instead of gray, to give it more emphasis.
    • We’ve included an example of a plugin icon in SVG format. We chose Jetpack as a common plugin that users might have installed alongside MP6. This is our suggested design for plugin icons, but not yet the final suggested method of implementation.

    Here are things that we discussed in feedback, but didn’t implement this week:

    • Test new values for green/amber/red status text.
    • Make adjustments to the secondary button styles for more contrast with the background.

    This week includes contributions from Ben, Mel, Isaac, Joen, Otto, and myself. Many thanks as well to those who gave their feedback, ideas, patches, and bug reports during Monday’s meeting.

    Like last time, we’ll do office hours on Monday to discuss next week’s iteration, followed by version 0.4 on next Friday; March 22. To save myself the time zone embarrassment from last time, let’s aim for 1800 UTC, whatever time that happens to be wherever you are in the world. Arrive an MP6 enthusiast; depart an MP6 contributor!

     

    • Jerry Bates (JerrySarcastic) 7:47 pm on March 15, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Looks great! In the end I agree that in the end #222 for the toolbar/admin menu looks the best. Funny how it grows on you…

    • Michael Adams (mdawaffe) 8:05 pm on March 15, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      The active menu item indicators look strange to me when hovering over an adjacent menu item.

      http://cl.ly/image/1K0B1S3M1s33

      • Matt Thomas 9:07 pm on March 15, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Yeah; that’s a little awkward but haven’t had a better idea for how to treat it yet. Maybe let the submenu overlap the main menu slightly? I think it would be awkward if the arrow disappeared.

    • esmi 8:33 pm on March 15, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Oh – nice plugins! And pretty UI. Three areas of concern from an a11y perspective, though:

      1. Can the contrast on “Collapse Menu” be pushed up a little to #888? Currently it’s a little too low for confort and well below the 4.5:1 suggested ratio.

      2. Post revision comparisons. Not sure I’m comfortable with red-on-red and green-on-green. At present, the contrasts are way too low at 2.7:1 (heck – even I’m having problems reading the changes).

      3. Ditto the text for inactive plugins on the Plugins page. Seriously – 2.8:1? And absolutely no way to “highlight” it without a mouse?

      On the plus side – love the new look. And plugins that hooked into the previous UI should port over really well judging by our tests with eShop.

      • Matt Thomas 9:06 pm on March 15, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Thanks; this will be helpful as we work on the next iteration. FWIW I haven’t even looked at post revisions yet, so something truly buggy/awful may be in effect there.

    • Ze Fontainhas 9:20 pm on March 15, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I love the changes and am really looking forward to what’s coming.

      Since I cannot help it, and fully aware that it might be a tad to soon to discuss this, I’d like to just leave the obligatory note regarding i18n, particularly in what concerns translated strings which are longer than their original English counterparts. Since the CSS is being discussed, perhaps some of this could be taken into consideration. Other than that, amazing work, thanks.

      • Matt Thomas 9:39 pm on March 15, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Thanks, Zé — I’ll definitely do a run in various languages to check for copyfit; some languages have a real knack for exposing places we’re forgotten to consider line-height, padding, or margins.

        Another i18n consideration is the Open Sans subsetting. We currently only load the latin subset, which means that languages that use latin extended are seeing an unholy mix of Open Sans and their system default sans-serif. We’ve talked a little bit about having MP6 automatically load subset extensions depending on what you need: latin, latin-ext, cyrillic, cyrillic-ext, greek, or greek-ext.

    • ianarmstrong 11:38 pm on March 15, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Hey Matt, do you plan on using modern responsive techniques on the admin bar? It still wraps in an ugly way on mobile: http://imperativeideas.com/misc/dev/stillaproblem.png

      I hoped to see that remedied in the new version.

    • Till 1:36 am on March 16, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I’d love to see the new admin menu float by default: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/floating-admin-menu/

    • Marco Galasso 10:32 am on March 16, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      v 0.3 Line 2607 should be:
      #menu-management .nav-tab:hover {
      background-color: #2ea2cc;
      color: #fff;
      }
      if not the hover state is white on white.

      • Matt Thomas 5:05 pm on March 18, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Could you post a screenshot of where you’re seeing white on white? That line is actually used for tabs on other screens, so adding the #menu-management ID would break it in those locations. I haven’t looked at the menu management screen yet at all, really.

    • Paul 10:46 am on March 16, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I think it needs more contrast, so I’d avoic grey on black and replace it with white. I’d also make the main content area background white, or at least a very lightt grey.
      And I’d replace the font with something a little bolder. Just to make everything more visible

      • Remkus de Vries 12:31 pm on March 16, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        I would say the current v0.3 version should definitely be improved with a strong focus on contrasts. The widgets in the widget areas are way to subtle right now as well.

    • buzztone 5:47 am on March 17, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      The Plugins list remains confusing for me (as noted last week by Mike Schinkel). It is quite difficult to distinguish between different plugins.

      Posts and Pages lists are easy to distinguish, despite removal of the lines between posts, due to the alternating white and grey backgrounds.

      Lines may need to be retained on Plugins list

      • Matt Thomas 4:48 pm on March 18, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        We’ve got some thin lines between items in the plugins list now, but I agree it probably still needs more work. We’ll continue trying different things on that screen.

      • Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 5:27 pm on March 18, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Can you see the lines in-between on your monitor? I checked on four (including iPad) and they look okay. 2 pixels didn’t see too heavy to me, but it makes me notice that the lines don’t extend all the way.

        http://cl.ly/image/2N2P1B1B2Z3R

        • Matt Thomas 7:55 pm on March 18, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          the lines don’t extend all the way.

          Eek, good catch. I’ll get that fixed too.

          • buzztone 1:18 am on March 23, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

            With changes made in v0.4 this is now really clear. The blue border and background to denote activated plugins look great.

            It also makes more sense to me in that it emphasises activated plugins. The grey backgrounds in 3.5.1 to me made the deactivated plugins stand out more.

            The use of the blue colour really improves the clarity of the Plugin List.

    • Tevya 4:44 pm on March 18, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      The buttons! The buttons are still rounded and given a slight “bubble” effect. Make them flat with square corners like everything else.

      • Matt Thomas 4:49 pm on March 18, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        I’ve been hesitating to change the buttons, because after using the Windows 8 “Metro” design language both in win8 and on the web (SkyDrive, etc.) I found the purely-flat buttons to be not quite buttony enough. Maybe squaring the corners or some other more subtle changes would be appropriate. That’s why I’m hesitant to remove the gradient and shadow styling.

        • Matt Mullenweg 6:47 am on March 19, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          Agreed.

        • Mel Choyce 1:10 am on March 20, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          I agree with both Matts — we don’t want to go too Metro. It starts getting hard to tell what’s a button and what’s not.

          Here’s a super quick stab at toning down the button styles: http://cl.ly/image/1V1n1r0S2M3B It could even be a little less subtle, honestly.

        • Tevya 2:55 pm on March 22, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          I can understand that. I’d suggest removing the rounded corners, but including a subtle gradient like Mel demonstrated. As it is the blue buttons (Publish/Update) stick out like a sore thumb. Even just going to a straight gradient would help a lot, I think. Here’s an example. All I did was turn off the rounded corners and the inset shadow and I think it looks much more consistent with the rest: http://db.tt/FKkok65u

    • corrinda 3:55 pm on March 19, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      The color used for the copy for the pages with the light colored background is a little too light making it difficult to read. This is the first time I’ve sen the proposed design for the Admin UI. There are some interesting changes but have to say I find the heavy black menu on the left rather imposing and with a rather cluttered look without the dividers.

    • jameskoster 5:56 pm on March 19, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Perhaps I’m missing something but I find myself questioning the point of this plugin?

      If it’s to make the admin panel inline with current design trends, that’s fine. But aren’t there more important UI things to consider at this point? Like optimising the markup / css, utilising a CSS Preprocessor, transitioning from px to em / rem, removing all bitmap images, going fully responsive, consistency etc etc?

      I appreciate that cannot all be achieved with a plugin (perhaps that’s why MP6 exists – to see if there’s demand for a new aesthetic), but laying the groundwork properly first would make skinning / iterating the current design so much easier in the long term. Shouldn’t that be the priority?

      My 2c on the design perspective; I think the admin bar should have a different background-color to the left hand nav. Seeing as it sits ‘on top’ of the main nav, I’d suggest making it slightly lighter to differentiate between the two. Right now they appear to be part of the same entity, until you scroll. Maybe even try blue http://cl.ly/image/3t273s2H3S0t ?

      Why no rounded corners? Curved corners can make a UI seem more friendly, which is important in something as daunting as WP. Would be interested to hear the psychology behind ditching them.

      I think the icons in the main nav are more seamless if set in the same size as the link text http://cl.ly/image/213t0S1O2G0Z

      The design stuff is all subjective of course (and that’s the biggest challenge with a project like this), but I’m interested to see where it all leads!

      • Helen Hou-Sandi 10:25 pm on March 19, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        The point of the plugin, at least in my understanding, is to explore what we can do with the admin to do things like incorporate vector/font-based icons as a part of the visual language, what aesthetic changes are needed to meld with the icons or vice versa, what issues there may or may not be regarding visual hierarchy and workflow representation on various screens, and just get a little adventurous in a way that fits better with what a cross-cycle, rapidly-developed plugin can do.

        I don’t think what the plugin currently does means it’s going to exclude things like CSS cleanup or better docs or starting to look at responsive, etc. It’s in development and is open to contributions; I know that I have contribution goals for this plugin that are not aesthetic-related. I also think that a CSS preprocessor is rather besides the point in this situation, and for all the asking for core to use one, I haven’t seen any actual practical demonstration of how one would be best used for WordPress and how it affects contributors, despite specifically having asked for it. See http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/22862#comment:2. Please feel free to demonstrate – I genuinely want to see it!

        HTML structure is an entirely separate issue, and you are correct, it cannot be addressed in a plugin. It is extraordinarily difficult to change markup in the admin – many, if not most, markup changes made in core elicit reports of breaking something somebody was doing. Sometimes it’s acceptable (they were doing something hacky); more often it’s not. Either way, the reality is that making those changes and then following through with feedback and commentary is quite time consuming and there never do seem to be enough front-end dev bodies, and even fewer who want to jump into this less glamorous side (and who can really blame them?)

      • Matt Thomas 10:44 pm on March 19, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        To add to what Helen said, I’d just say that MP6 doesn’t stand in the way of any of the “more important UI things” mentioned above. While MP6 grew out of an effort to update the dashboard icons in 3.6, the work that is being done on it should have no effect on any efforts to optimize markup, use preprocessors, going fully responsive, etc (removing all bitmap images is something we’re doing in MP6). That’s why it’s a plugin — while our hope is that many of our suggestions eventually make their way into core, none of us are core team members, so no time is being taken away from the bigger tasks that lay ahead.

        • Helen Hou-Sandi 3:38 am on March 20, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          Indeed. I’m just doing drive-by observations with MP6 until at least 3.6 RC (when I stop being able to commit as a guest committer) – the whole focusing on the core cycle thing :)

    • Mike McAlister 7:50 pm on March 20, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I love the idea of the dark navbar. It gives the admin more of an app feel, which I think WordPress is well suited for, given its many modules.

      I do think, however, that the current MP6 dark menu could use a little more detailing. I grabbed the plugin and spent a half hour tweaking a few thing. You can check out the differences here: http://cl.ly/NhFi

      Some of these notes may have been suggested, but here are a few thoughts.

      • I love the adoption of the flat UI, but it leaves the admin menu feeling sparse and disconnected. Links seem to run into each other and it’s harder to navigate. Menu items need more distinction.
      • The dark is almost too dark, making it feel like an older interface, rather than something new or iterative.
      • The blue hover links in the menu need to be lightened if you’re going to use blue. Both colors are too dark/harsh to be optimally legible on hover. In my edits, I kept the icon blue but the text hovered to white.
      • I love Open Sans on the WordPress.com site. It feels a little off in the admin though. It’s a bit more playful of a sans-serif and contributes to the dark color feeling more retro than contemporary. Helvetica Neue felt very solid and modern and would compliment a dark menu well.
      • Several people have noted this already, but the admin bar should stand out from the admin menu.

      So anyway, I’ve really only tinkered with the menu (and briefly at that), but I think some of these modifications could really get the dark admin menu on track. If you’re interested in test driving my iteration or peeking at the code, you can download the plugin here: http://cl.ly/NhNy.

      • Kelderic 10:35 pm on March 20, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        I really like your changes to the main menu. Adding lines between each menu items is a distinct improvement. One thing I’d suggest is continuing that and adding lines between the sub-menu items.

    • Shea Bunge 9:22 pm on March 20, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Very nice! One thing, shouldn’t the visual editor font default to Open Sans instead of Georgia? It looks a little strange against the new interface

    • Dean Robinson 6:51 am on March 22, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Oh my, this is looking very nice. Liking where its headed thus far, but that’s probably not a massive surprise. I’ve really been liking the WordPress.com interface lately (in particular the super simple new post interface), so nice to see some of that style filtering through.

      Also feels a lot like where Fluency Admin might have been (and a little of where it had already been) if I’d had enough time to keep it up-to-date over the past couple of years (time that was put to other uses because the core admin had already gotten close enough to Fluency that I couldn’t really justify spending more time on it).

      Really looking forward to see how this evolves.

  • Daryl Koopersmith 4:03 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink
    Tags: ,   

    Media Wireframes 

    Over the past week or so, I’ve worked closely with @lessbloat (Dave), @nacin, and @markjaquith to create a set of media workflows that will hopefully serve as a foundation and guide for the improvements in this release. (This is the fifth version of these wireframes — you can see the first four on Dave’s site.)

    The usual disclaimers: None of this is final. These are wireframes, so please focus your feedback on the experience, not the aesthetics. As for scope, we are focusing our changes on improving the modal experience. This focuses on the overall picture; not all of this will necessarily make it into the final release.

    So, without further ado…

    Wireframes and workflows — fullscreen recommended.

    The media library.

    The media library, while uploading three files.

    The attachment details screen.

    Relevant Trac tickets: #21390, #21391.

     

    • Scott Kingsley Clark 4:16 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Yes! WP 3.5 is easily the most anticipated release for me in a long while. This is beautiful!

    • Mel Choyce 4:18 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Looking good! I just noticed one thing missing — on the attachment details screen, there’s no longer an option for linking an image to a specific URL (like to another site).

      • Vitor Carvalho 4:20 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Maybe because you can do it in the editor, selecting the image and then click on “link button” which will give you more options than the ones you had before.

      • Andrew Nacin 4:22 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Not a deliberate omission — thanks for pointing that out. We should definitely look into making that UI support a custom URL.

        • krogsgard 5:34 am on July 31, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          I’d love to see an option to link to the parent post as well (or current post if media won’t include a direct attachment relationship anymore). This isn’t included now, but it’s a great time to add the ability, or at least a hook, which I don’t think is there now.

          Absolutely incredible work y’all. This is really, really great.

      • Russell Heimlich 4:59 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        +1 for this. We use this feature a lot. Uploading an image then copying the URL of the image for use in a widget or somewhere else. If it were easy to select an image from the media library and reference the URL in something like a widget, that would be great as well.

        • Daryl Koopersmith 5:14 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          Ah, I think you and Mel are talking about two different things (using a custom url when linking the image to in the post, versus the showing the permalink to the image itself), but you also have a point.

      • bradyvercher 5:20 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        +1 for me, too. I’d like to be able to save a custom URL for each image and have that available as an option when inserting a gallery. I’ve found it useful for linking thumbnails to PDFs or press photos to external websites.

      • Brady Vercher 5:39 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        This is looking pretty sweet! Great job so far. I had a couple of thoughts that might be outside the scope of this refresh, but would be nice to consider:

        Embedding the media iframe directly on a CPT edit screen (or potentially the gallery post format) without having to open the media popup would be killer. Inserting a gallery into the post editor doesn’t always make sense.

        Allowing a target field for the “Insert” button would be quite helpful for inserting an image into a widget or option field. Being able to specify whether the image URL, ID, or maybe a JSON object is returned would be even better. And can the “Insert” label be filterable?

        I’ve found it fairly difficult to re-crop an automatically cropped thumbnail and have it link back to the original image.

        Anyways, I’m looking forward to seeing how this turns out!

    • Vitor Carvalho 4:19 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Fantastic concept! This new release will give us a good reason to not install any other gallery plugin. :)

      • wlindley 12:42 pm on August 1, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Unless you want to do something automatic, instead of manually. The AutoNav plugin, for example lets you resize thumbnails on-the-fly: [autonav display="attached" size="200x175"]… or sort by different fields (date, title), or automatically display the first few attachments, or display attachments from other posts according to their tags or category… things which are “reactive” as you change other things in the site, versus this UI which lets you manually control everything. Both can be useful.

    • Mert Yazicioglu 4:20 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I really like it, looks like the media management aspect of WordPress will finally get some love :)

      One question though, what happens when an image is clicked seem to differ from one action to another. I personally prefer this method but would that confuse the new users is what is bugging me.

      • Andrew Nacin 5:16 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        It does differ, for sure. But we also think this will be intuitive, depending on what the user is trying to do. The different actions are glaring in the slide deck, but I doubt it will be as obvious when you’re actually using it.

        There’s also a “Back” button, and we intend for these dialogs to be lightning-fast, not full page reloads, so it’s easy to return to where you left off.

        But that said, this will all get heavily user-tested. And so if we find that we need to make modifications to our hover/click/next workflow, we will adjust it for sure.

    • Ben Huson 4:20 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I think the wireframes look really good.

      I particularly like the status to indicate the current selection.

      Not 100% convinced on the infinite scrolling but that may just be because I am used to paging – I like having the option of being able to browse the image library but easily jump forward huge jumps, or to the last page etc.

      Noticed one thing missing – there is currently an advanced tab when you edit an image which allows you to change classes etc.

      Also, it wasn’t clear what “Create a Gallery” does and wether you can create multiple galleries?

      • Andrew Nacin 4:31 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        No, that Advanced tab is going to go away. That entire dialog goes through TinyMCE’s media handling, which makes for some awkward asymmetry. As implied in the “Edit an image” section, it opens the WP “Edit Media” window, not a TinyMCE window.

        We discussed this pretty extensively. If you want to set things like CSS classes, custom styles, borders, horizontal/vertical padding, etc., you should be opening the Text (HTML) editor and doing it yourself. There’s no need for a UI for this. It’s been quite the hidden UI (and a confusing one at that), so this isn’t much of a loss.

        • thenbrent 6:45 am on July 31, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          you should be opening the Text (HTML) editor and doing it yourself

          Praise! Ditch redundant UI.

        • Sheri Bigelow 2:33 pm on August 1, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          If you want to set things like CSS classes, custom styles, borders, horizontal/vertical padding, etc., you should be opening the Text (HTML) editor and doing it yourself.

          I don’t know. From my experience working with WP.com users, here are the things I think users will most miss from the advanced options:

          • Custom URL (I think you’ve already said it was overlooked and should be there)
          • Featured Image (looks like you’re adding that back too)
          • Alt text (accessibility-wise, it’s really not the same as title or description)
          • Explicit size settings (users use way more size options than the Settings → Media presets offer)
          • Border
          • Target

      • Andrew Nacin 4:36 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Yes, this will likely support multiple galleries in some way. I think multiple galleries are really important when telling a story with photos — we’ll see what we’re able to do.

        • Simon Wheatley (Code for the People) 4:56 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          I think you are, but to check: do you & Koop envisage being able to add one attachment to more than one gallery, i.e. break the requirement for an attachment to be the child of a post in order to feature in a gallery on that post? (That would be cool… and I have some code to do it, but you won’t like it as it’s serialised in a meta.)

          • Daryl Koopersmith 5:06 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

            In a word, yes. We’re thinking of using the current post_parent-based connection to mean “this media item was uploaded to this post object”, and changing galleries to be an explicit list of IDs (using the existing shortcode). We discussed this a bit in dev chat last week.

            • Ben Huson 7:40 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink

              Could galleries basically be a ‘gallery’ taxonomy for media or is an explicit list of IDs better?

            • Andrew Nacin 8:52 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink

              @Ben We discussed this, and think that it would be better for now to continue with the ‘transient’ galleries, rather than moving to persistence with galleries as a taxonomy. We’d rather not conflate workflow changes with underlying schema changes, and a few of us don’t think that galleries necessarily work best as a simple taxonomy (as you only get a description out of it, for example). This is something a plugin can do for now. Ideally we’ll revisit it in the long-term.

            • Ben Huson 9:03 am on July 31, 2012 Permalink

              Makes sense.

            • Ben Huson 9:04 am on July 31, 2012 Permalink

              … maybe when we have taxonomy meta in core? ;)

            • Peter Chester 3:31 pm on August 15, 2012 Permalink

              +1 on @Ben’s p.s. about taxonomy meta :)

          • Andrew Nacin 5:08 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

            This is actually already doable. When you do there is no requirement for those images to be attached to the current post. We’ll be piggybacking on that.

        • GreenDiablo 3:03 pm on August 22, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          Love the new concept for the Media Library and the fact that multiple galleries are supported and you can select the images that go into the gallery (not mandated anymore by the images that are uploaded to a post)! Great job on the wires!

          Would love to get more involved and help work on UX/UI. Where do I best get started to help work on concepts etc. even in the early stages?

    • Brian Richards 4:21 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      This is AB-SO-LUTE-LY amazing! Great work to everyone involved so far!

      Flipping through these, I think you guys have covered the entirety of what I was hoping to see in the media upload enhancements. I’m very excited :)

      As I was thinking about all the changes this weekend I pondered about the possibility of incorporating a drop-zone within the Featured Image metabox itself, so a user can drag-n-drop an image directly into the Featured Image metabox and it will upload and be set as featured. It’s likely this was already discussed somewhere and I missed it.

      If not, would you say that action falls in line with the rest of these changes?

      • Daryl Koopersmith 4:25 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Glad you like it! We’ve discussed integrating dropzones and other media bits outside the editor and decided that would be a bit too much for 3.5… but an easy first step will be to make the “choose a new x” buttons dropzones as well.

        As for featured images, depending on what we do with thumbnails, there’s a chance we’ll run them through the crop step as well.

        • Nick 9:17 am on August 10, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          If using a drop zone for the Featured Image metabox is too much for 3.5, might I suggest automatically setting the image as a featured image if the user opened the media window by clicking on the “Set featured image” link in the featured image metabox?

          The current workflow for setting a featured image (Click “set featured image”, upload the image in the media popover, scroll down and click “use as featured image” after it’s uploaded) is one that new users of WordPress seem to consistently trip up over, from my testing. (They forget the last step and wonder why the image isn’t listed as featured when they close the media window; they have already told WordPress that they’d like to set a featured image, after all.) Removing the need to click “set as featured image” would improve usability a great deal.

          Love the new changes, though. Great work!

    • Andrew Nacin 4:21 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I’ve had the opportunity to do in-person walkthroughs of this slide deck with a number of people who work with WordPress regularly, including @matt, a UX expert, a journalist, two developers, and a blogger. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

      It is great to have distinctive steps for the user, especially since they can jump into a specific dialog (such as jumping straight to the “Edit Media” screen from TinyMCE). However, when it comes to implementation, the screens are tightly coupled —

      One question I was asked (@matt brought it up, in particular) is at what point does a caption save to the DB against the attachment, and at what point is it stored only in the post (and no longer syncs)? @markjaquith, @koopersmith, and I literally spent a number of hours discussing this issue, and how it relates to the usefulness of attachment pages, etc. I *do* think there is a way to implement this seamlessly and intuitively, without forcing users to make a decision on where, when, or how something gets saved. (It should “Just work.”)

      Ultimately, we’re just going to have to put our heads together to work this out. And so I intend to have a discussion and resolution on this at the WordCamp SF Hack Day on Sunday.

      You’ll note that “Title” and “Description” are now omitted from the Insert/Edit Media screen. That is intentional, given how ridiculous it is to have four fields here, when these two apply only to attachment pages. See #21391 on how we hope to improve this by separating the UIs.

      • Archetyped 6:00 am on August 6, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Great wireframes and great discussion thus far! This is probably something that many have wanted to see get an overhaul (myself included). Here’s a suggestion for handling instance-based media properties (e.g. caption, etc):

        The main difference is that selected images are displayed at the top. This is done for a few reasons:

        • Images to be inserted are clearly defined – when selected images are inline with entire media library, they can easily get lost in the noise– especially with infinite scrolling.
        • Changing order of selected images is straightforward – it’s not immediate obvious to users how to change the order of the selected images when they are inline with the rest of the media library. Will I be able to drag them around? Will moving an image affect its position in the media library as a whole?
        • Instance-based properties are made available only for selected images – For example, caption property can set once the image is selected. There is no reason for it to be accessible prior to this and it is clear that the properties being set affect the current instance of the media to be inserted (i.e. not saved to the DB).
        • Enables multiple instances of the same media to be inserted – An edge case, yes, but it also removes an arbitrary limit on how a user can build their content.

        Again, great work all, I look forward to seeing this progress!

        • Archetyped 6:12 am on August 6, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          Just a quick note regarding handling large quantities of selected images in the top area. There are several potential solutions, a few of which are:

          Carousel/slider display – Horizontally scroll through images.

          • Pro: Maintains a fixed amount of vertical spaced used by selected images to allow for maximal area for browsing through media library
          • Con: Can take time to horizontally scroll through many images

          Expand-o button – Hide selected images until done selecting all desired images. Then hit button (e.g. placed near “3 images selected” element) and grid of selected images takes center stage.

          • Pro: Allows quick and easy management of large amounts of selected images and keeps selected images out of the way until needed
          • Con: Requires an additional click to manage selected images

          Horizontal Row + Expand-o button – A combo of the best of both worlds. Display a single row of selected images, but hide additional images when more items than can be displayed until the “show all” button is clicked.

          • Pro: Small amounts of selected images can be easily managed without any additional clicks
          • Con: Requires an additional click for large amounts of images

    • Isaac Keyet 4:23 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Amazing work here. Even without a complete overhaul, the main window for browsing existing media library content or uploading new, which also combines a “shortcut” to create a gallery would be enough of an improvement going into 3.5.

      Some things I noticed/wished for while viewing the slideshow:

      • Edit image modal should probably have a Delete button to keep it consistent with the zoomed out view and it’s options – if Edit image is the expanded options it should have the same functions as the thumbnail and then some.
      • Since every upload to WP adds the media to the Media Library, it would make more sense (and save space) to have the “drop area” be the first item in the list from the media library, it would also help make the transition to showing uploads in progress make more sense.
      • Love the insert media button from the post editor itself, that addition in itself is a huge step towards increased usability. I’d argue it should be a part of the formatting toolbar though – especially if we’re going to fork TinyMCE.

      More to come, will need to let this settle for a bit.

      • Devin Reams 4:29 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Love the insert media button from the post editor itself, that addition in itself is a huge step towards increased usability.

        It looks nice but not sure how it’d work with multiple “types” of things to insert (forms, polls, other plugin features).

        • Andrew Nacin 4:38 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          We’re really just styling the existing link + icon as a button, so I don’t think this is much of an addition, or how it’d affect other forms of media.

        • Isaac Keyet 4:40 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          It’s true that it doesn’t really scale. Ultimately though, you’re inserting something into the body of a post, to me that should mean that it should be in the formatting toolbar itself (tinyMCE).

          In the meantime Insert/Upload Media could receive special treatment and be the only button there, while “secondary” options that plugins would add could be styled the old way with a label on the left.

      • Andrew Nacin 4:41 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        A few thoughts:

        • The problem with “Delete” is, what does it mean? Does it mean you want to remove that image from the post, or do you want to delete it from the media library? What if you have it inserted in other posts or included in other galleries? “Edit Image” (as in, cropping, etc.) has its own troubles in this regard as well. We need to be careful not to conflate different things.
        • We considered this. But since that pane will scroll, you lose a persistent location for uploads. It doesn’t make sense. The nice thing about the persistent left location is that it can be used across a number of screens, and have a contextual response depending on the screen. For example, if you’re actively creating a gallery, your uploaded image can be added directly to that gallery.

        • Daryl Koopersmith 4:45 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          But since that pane will scroll, you lose a persistent location for uploads.

          This is the main issue with using the dropzone as the first item (we debated it for quite a while). Also, on multisite, the dropzone is accompanied by several lines of text (space remaining, acceptable filetypes, etc), so squeezing that all into a single item would be a bit cramped.

          • Andrew Ozz 2:53 am on August 8, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

            Imho the whole area should be upload drop-zone. Makes the most sense to drop images straight in the library, where the other uploaded images are (consistent with moving images from one folder to another on MacOS or WIndows).

            A Select Files button can be at the top for users that prefer to click something or use non-html5 browsers. Don’t see a problem if button is hidden when the page is scrolled down, the users would know where to find it.

            Alternatively can have a persistent (position: fixed) toolbar, much like the toolbar on other admin screens where the Upload button would be. Also good place for Help button, search etc.

          • Andrew Ozz 2:56 am on August 8, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

            This would make the whole layout cleaner too. No need for thin “sidebar” and small drop-zone that might be hard to hit when dragging.

        • Isaac Keyet 4:47 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          • To me it’s just a matter of labeling the delete action correctly, could even have different removal options and have primary and secondary removal actions. Default is to Remove from post, secondary Remove from Media Library (the latter should have a profound warning about the implications of removing the item from the media library). Image editing options “delete” button could simply be “reset”.
          • Regardless we need to consider smaller screen devices from the start, this layout assumes a wide computer screen. Uploaded media items on a selected post are automatically attached to the post, so why not have this be the selected section where you could compile your gallery? It would also be the perfect place to display help text like “You have not attached any media yet, upload or select from library below”.

          • Daryl Koopersmith 5:01 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

            Regardless we need to consider smaller screen devices from the start, this layout assumes a wide computer screen.

            Absolutely — most of this UI can be built in a responsive/reactive fashion. Mobile-sized screens will likely need a few extra changes, but hopefully we can make that experience just as smooth.

            Uploaded media items on a selected post are automatically attached to the post, so why not have this be the selected section where you could compile your gallery? It would also be the perfect place to display help text like “You have not attached any media yet, upload or select from library below”.

            • We’ve been discussing changing the meaning of “attaching” a media item to a post object (see last week’s dev chat for details).
            • Since we’re also looking to support multiple galleries in a post, we can’t immediately jump from batch upload to the gallery UI.
            • Help text and good copy will be key here.

        • Brian Richards 5:04 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          I think the “Delete” action could be handled most simply by a confirmation modal for the user, “Are you sure you want to permanently delete this image from your entire site?” and then give them three very clear options, “Cancel”, “No, just remove it from this post”, “Yes, delete it site-wide”. We could even humanize it further by making the site-wide delete a red button.

          • Daryl Koopersmith 5:09 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

            Permanent delete will have to be well marked, that’s for sure. I dislike the idea of conflating both under a single “delete” action, though — that will only add to the confusion. Instead, we can just label each accordingly (we deal with “remove” versus “delete” in several other places in core in a similar fashion).

      • Isaac Keyet 5:49 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Some quick thoughts in images (playing with this).

        Uploading an image from the post editor has only one purpose, you want to use it in the post you’re editing somehow, most likely creating a gallery. This UI would be a better way to keep an overview of what you’ve done so far, and if you’re adding old images from the library even getting an overview of what’s selected and what’s not is going to be hard (imagine if you’ve “infinite scrolled” 2-3 page folds down, only way to get an overview then is to go to the gallery tab).

        Uploading media/inserting individual image. The last uploaded item(s) should be to the left, to origin from the drop zone. Assuming ascending sorting.

        Many attached items, some selected from library

        • lessbloat 6:33 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          A couple thoughts:

          • Having 5 columns if space allows is a nice touch.
          • I still prefer to have the “Drop files here” box persistent on the side. If I scroll at all in these mockups, I would immediately lose the “Drop files here” box.
          • I don’t think the visual separation between “Selected media” and “Media library” really adds anything (except a few additional px of extra height ;-) ), in fact I like the idea that the lines between these two are blurred (everything you upload goes to the same place).

    • Devin Reams 4:27 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Cool stuff, great work everyone.

      One question I was asked (@matt brought it up, in particular) is at what point does a caption save to the DB against the attachment, and at what point is it stored only in the post (and no longer syncs)?

      We often have the same problem (training) when a ‘description’ or ‘caption’ is something dynamic (saved to db) and can be used consistently versus inline (when inserted)

      I also see a little bit of headache not being able to set the ‘Featured Image’ from the Insert/Upload screen as this is a pretty common workflow (again, training) that folks use: Upload > Set as Featured. Or Upload > Find image > Set as featured. Keeping in mind that some folks use multiple ‘Featured’ slots, too.

      • Andrew Nacin 4:33 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Upload > Set as Featured — that’s a good thing to keep in mind. That’s probably something we can add to the “Insert Media” dialog once you click “Insert.” Not quite the same workflow we have now, but, yeah… Keeping everything compatible with multiple featured image implementations is going to be fun, to say the least.

      • Daryl Koopersmith 4:34 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        We often have the same problem (training) when a ‘description’ or ‘caption’ is something dynamic (saved to db) and can be used consistently versus inline (when inserted)

        This is a particular pet peeve of mine — I’d really like to find a way to communicate this well.

        I also see a little bit of headache not being able to set the ‘Featured Image’ from the Insert/Upload screen…

        One of the goals of this release is to separate out the various media workflows into their individual components. A side effect of that is separating inserting media into the post and setting a featured image. If testing reveals this to be a mistake, we can always discuss merging them back. That said, as with any UI change, will be a bit of an adjustment phase for existing users.

    • Scott Kingsley Clark 4:30 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Do we know yet how extensible this new UI will be from a plugin standpoint? Will the Media editor form be given proper hooks for adding additional fields? The current filters really stink and I bet we could do something much better during the dev of the new UI.

      • Andrew Nacin 4:35 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        The priority is going to be keeping the current filters working, which isn’t going to be a cakewalk. But yes, this will be extensible.

        • Scott Kingsley Clark 4:36 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          Excellent, that’s music to my ears, I’ve been working closely with these filters and know of their many failings, looking forward to seeing what we can put together that supports the old filters as well as improving upon them for the new UI’s needs.

    • Helen Hou-Sandi 4:39 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      On the accessibility front (since I’ve promised to keep an eye on it):

      • We need to make sure that everything is accessible, both via keyboard and assistive tech. Not sure if we’ll be able to make it absolutely perfect, especially without more help and expertise, but we should definitely not be neglecting this during feature dev.
      • There needs to be an alternative (or a change) to important interactions/reveals that rely on hovering. Again for non-mouse users, and also including touch devices.

      • Isaac Keyet 4:42 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        +1, accessibility mode much needed to think through. Also of note: placeholder HTML5 element is only supported by the latest mobile webkit browsers, if possible we shouldn’t rely on it for important field labeling or at the very least have a fall-back (regular label outside the field).

      • Andrew Nacin 4:45 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        • Yes — we extensively discussed accessibility when planning these out. In particular, the main pane should be navigable via the keyword. So, up-down-left-right should move through the media library. Space or enter should select that image. In the case of a gallery, a “space” would select an image to then move it, until it is “dropped” again later. We can discuss and test these exact interactions during development.
        • This will most certainly need to work on touch devices.

        • Andrew Ozz 3:52 am on August 8, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          So, up-down-left-right should move through the media library.

          Using the arrow keys is usually reserved for navigating tree-like structures, mostly menus with several levels of submenus. For the gallery it would be better to use the Tab key.

          Arranging the gallery images would be hard without an accessibility mode similar to the widgets screen.

      • Daryl Koopersmith 4:48 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        All hover interactions will be taps on touch devices (as they are in most of our other UIs), and if there are holes in the touch device workflow we can add tweaks to make the process better. We won’t leave them high and dry. :)

    • Sami Keijonen 4:57 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Looks great! I’ve been wondering can images be also filtered by author? I have magazine with students (authors) and they upload a lot of (unnecessary) images. It would help if they could filter they own images or admin could do it. This might be out of scope here.

      • Daryl Koopersmith 5:03 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Interesting thought. We hadn’t discussed adding filter by author, but depending on how the sort/filter/search UIs turn out, it might be feasible. If not, we should make this easy to do with a plugin.

    • RDall 4:57 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I would absolutely love to be able to type in the width and get the constrained proportion. So many times I have typed in 150 width only to see the height doesn’t change as well…

    • DrewAPicture 5:12 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      This is a really good iteration and I’m looking forward to seeing more.

      One inconsistency that kind of sticks out for me is the ‘Edit’ button vs the edit icon button. In some places you click the icon, in some places you get both the icon and ‘Edit’ but then you’re clicking ‘Edit’ and not the icon. Personally, I’d prefer we stick with one or the other. My vote’s on the icon :)

      Per the ‘captions to DB’ discussion, why not just run some kind of ajax autosave?

      • Daryl Koopersmith 5:21 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        One inconsistency that kind of sticks out for me is the ‘Edit’ button vs the edit icon button.

        These buttons actually lead to different places, so we should probably hide the paintbrush icon in those cases. The paintbrush icon will actually lead to the image editor (crop, resize, etc), which is also accessible from the “edit attachment details” screen. We haven’t entirely decided on the technical requirements around the editor, so those screens have not been mocked yet (and will likely be decided at the WCSF hack day).

        • Daryl Koopersmith 5:23 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          We definitely need to figure out how to disassociate editing an image’s details (alignment, caption, etc) from editing an image itself (resizing, cropping, etc).

      • Andrew Nacin 5:22 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Per the ‘captions to DB’ discussion, why not just run some kind of ajax autosave?

        Oh, don’t worry, these will save via ajax. :-) But once you insert an image into the editor, that caption is free-form text. Under what circumstances should that caption text remain synced with the attachment in the DB, versus allowing them to diverge? You can use the same image in multiple posts, and captions from the DB are used in galleries, so it can get confusing very quickly.

        • Andrew Ozz 3:33 am on August 8, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          Yeah, and annoying too. If all is synced with the DB that means there would be impossible to have different caption on the same image when the image is used in different places / different context. What’s more: if an old image is reused later and the caption is edited, that edit would show in the gallery. This may not be intended.

          Currently the captions are disassociated from the DB as soon as the image is inserted in a post. Seems we can keep this.

    • Mark McWilliams 5:16 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      It’ll be good to see the wireframes make their way into Core! :)

    • DrewAPicture 5:17 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I’m curious about the thinking behind moving the drag-n-drop zone from right (Dave’s 4th iteration) to the left (this iteration). I kinda like it better on the right, myself.

      • Daryl Koopersmith 6:22 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        We moved the dropzone to bring more balance to the UI. All of the primary actions are aligned in the top right of the selection UI so aligning them with the right edge and bringing them closer to the dialog close button makes them more prominent. Also, when uploading is involved, it usually is the first step a user takes, so it makes sense to align it on the left side of the screen, where a user will see it sooner.

        • Dominik Schilling (ocean90) 8:05 am on August 1, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          Maybe we could use the dialog itself as a dropzone, so that it’s not necessary to drop it specific to this small box on the left side.

          If you have a big screen the browser is normally on the left side and the file explorer or desktop on the right. Yet you have to drag your file from right to the far away left side, which isn’t the best usability I think.

    • Chris Jean 5:18 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      This is eerie. Really, really eerie. I talked with my coworker last week about a better Media Library screen, and this has all the key elements I talked about. So very, very weird.

      I’m excited. Please oh please let it be easy for non-core developers to use the full functionality of it.

      From the mockup, it looks like we will finally be able to create galleries with media that is not directly attached to that content. If we can make this happen, it will be awesome. I tried to make a gallery site for an artist friend of mine, and that limitation made me use a plugin when 95% of everything else was built into core.

    • zekeweeks 5:26 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I love the seamless flow between upload/select, gallery and image details, and insertion. And the contextual reactions between “insert single” and “insert gallery” are a huge usability plus. Very excited about this.

      One worry I have is on slides 12 and 13: https://speakerdeck.com/u/koop/p/wordpress-3-dot-5-media-wireframes?slide=12 . When one image is selected, we have two “insert” buttons which do the same thing- one persistent one at the top, and one on the individual image. However, when we have more than one selected (slide 13), the top button contextually switches to provide “insert gallery” functionality, but we still have an “insert” button on each individual image.

      I worry that this will create two problems:

      1. When selecting a single image, users may not notice the “insert” button on the top, and therefore never notice that it switches to support a gallery when multiple images are selected
      2. Worse: when intending to select multiple images and create a gallery, clicking “insert” over an image will lose their selections and take them into details for the insertion of just one image without even realizing it.

      For these reasons, I’d lean toward getting rid of the “insert” buttons over individual images altogether, and make the button on the top right be a consistent, universal button that is the “next-step-here” button for all contexts. However, this issue could be addressed other ways (only showing “Insert” for single selections, making “Insert” react as a gallery when multiples are selected, etc.)

      • Andrew Nacin 8:58 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        I was strongly for the individual Insert buttons for a few reasons. Without them, I think the ease in which you can select multiple images (particularly since you can scroll so a selection is outside the viewing area) could cause people to create galleries when they don’t want to. They would need to clear the selection and then look around again to select the single image they originally wanted to insert.

        Note that we deliberately chose two different verbs: The current “Insert” into post, versus “Create” a gallery. Now, maybe that isn’t enough. This is all testable — we’ll find out during user testing. We can figure out what works and what doesn’t, and adjust the button placements, strings, and the like.

        We could also consider showing the selection status bar only once you have two images selected, and have individual insert buttons otherwise. I think this change could handle all of the issues we’ve both highlighted. Very good points, thanks for the feedback.

    • RDall 6:04 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Hey guys one thing. You know how you can show the amount of post to show in the screen via “Screen Options” Can we add that to the media library? Once I got a site that have 100 or so images scrolling through them wasn’t that easy and the search was only good if I remembered what I named it. (And some days my naming convention was better then others… )

    • RDall 7:22 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      You guys rock! That will be awesome!!!!!!!!!

    • MartyThornley 8:26 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      This all looks awesome! One thing I noticed is that you either insert one image or insert a gallery. There are a lot of uses for inserting multiple images, yet not in a gallery, especially for photobloggers who write a few words then say, here are ten images… And they just show ten images one after the next. Adding that option to the “Insert” buttons would be great!

      • Andrew Nacin 9:01 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        If you want 10 images consecutively, then chances are you do want a gallery. Specifically, of the one-column, full-width variety.

        If you don’t want 10 images consecutively, then you need to adjust your cursor each time so we know where you want those images. (If, for example, you’re telling a story and want text in between the photos.)

        This dialog is not going to be a separate load of WordPress inside of a frame, like the current thickbox implementation. It’ll open (and re-open) immediately, like internal linking. So it shouldn’t actually be painful to individually insert these images if that’s what you wanted.

        • MartyThornley 5:01 pm on July 31, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          I was actually thinking the same as I looked through the workflow more. It is not possible with the current (old) one, but I think new workflow would definitely work for this.

      • Dominik Schilling (ocean90) 1:49 pm on July 31, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        +1 for an option to insert all selected images.
        When I start to write a post I upload the images first.
        My preferred workflow would be to insert all uploaded images and then write the text between the images and/or adjust the images. And I know many people who would like this too.

        See also #7013.

        • Andrew Nacin 2:53 pm on July 31, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          The problem with this is it confuses users, who will wonder what the difference is between inserting multiple images versus creating a gallery. A gallery really doesn’t mean that much in WordPress, but it is better when it comes to handling more than a few images. We want to keep the UI simple.

          Something we should think about, though.

        • MartyThornley 5:05 pm on July 31, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          This is one spot where a gallery doesn’t work. Thinking of them all in a row, it makes more sense to have a type of gallery that is one image after another. But there are spots where you need to just insert a few images quickly then add some text.
          Maybe it could be “Insert Multiple Images” instead of “Insert Gallery” and then what is mocked up here as the gallery options would let you choose “Insert as Gallery” and choose columns, etc… or “Insert Images” which would just add the multiple image tags.

          • Andrew Nacin 5:18 pm on July 31, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

            I understand the latter point, but just a note, a one-column gallery with full-width images does work, if you want images one after another.

    • ChaseWiseman 10:44 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      First of all, great work. I am very excited about this. One question: is there any reason the Featured Image dialog can’t get the same cropping features as the Custom Header dialog? Both the custom header and featured image sizes are defined in a similar fashion. It would be nice to choose which area of an image you want to use as the Featured Image.

      • Daryl Koopersmith 10:54 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        We’ve discussed it and might do just that. It depends on how the image editor (discussed above) turns out.

        • DrewAPicture 4:31 pm on July 31, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          This would be a really ‘good-to-have’ feature. Most of the time we’re using resized thumbs on archives and cropping from center on vertical images or images where faces are near the top is frustrating when it’s forced from the center. Being able to manually crop would be fantastic.

    • nhuja 3:49 am on July 31, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Great work. Having been solely into Photography themes, this is an awesome development. I always thought media management was the weakest part of WordPress. And I was planning to develop this on my own as well. :) I would love to know how these things are addressed or can be addressed:

      1. I see the Create New Gallery option which is great. So, will there be a link where we can manage those Galleries (Albums), list of galleries available? Like delete an image or add another image to the gallery ?

      2. Can one image be assigned to multiple galleries ? Currently it doesn’t allow unless we do shortcode cheat (I think). Also, if we are viewing the Media Library view (list of images), in the grid style, it might be great if there is a “belongs to X gallery”.

      3. Can we insert one gallery to multiple posts ? Now this is one prime feature I get requests from customers. :)

      Thanks, I am really looking forward to this development. :)

      Cheers!
      Chandra

      • lessbloat 12:06 pm on July 31, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        1) Yep. The idea is that once you add a gallery to the editor, you can click the edit button on that gallery in the visual editor mode, and add/remove images from that gallery.

        2) Yep, any image will be able to be added to any gallery.

        3) Perhaps. I’m not certain this has been worked through at the stage, though I agree this would be nice. :-)

    • Konstantin Kovshenin 4:41 am on July 31, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      This is just awesome! I’m glad that media management is getting some serious love in this release. Great work everyone!

    • thenbrent 6:53 am on July 31, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      This looks fantastic, thanks for all the hard work you’re putting in to get media handling right.

      When opening the Insert Media dialogue, will it display *all* media, or just those attached to the post? I’ve had complaints from users in the past about different tabs for all media and media uploaded on the one post.

      The Insert Gallery looks identical to the Insert Media. This could lead to occasional disorientation. But that’s nothing a different shade of grey or some other bit of CSS wouldn’t fix.

      • Andrew Nacin 2:43 pm on July 31, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        It’ll display all media.

        The two screens do look similar, yes, but these are only wireframes, not designs. I too have noted that disorientation is possible here. We will make sure the screens are designed with that in mind.

    • andyadams 1:42 pm on July 31, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      For some reason, my last couple of comments never made it through, so I’ll try reposting the general idea:

      I like the improvements, but have you considered ditching the modal window for something less obtrusive? Perhaps something more like the Theme Customizer that pops out on the lefthand side?

      I say this because 2 major problems I have with modals are:

      • Loss of context of the content editor.
      • Difficulty in inserting multiple single images.

      Having a modal take over the whole screen makes inserting media feel like a completely different operation than writing your content, and I feel like the two tasks could potentially be toggled in a less jolting way. This would make writing your post with lots of media a much smoother process.

      • Andrew Nacin 2:42 pm on July 31, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        We’ve discussed ditching the modal window for years. Literally, here’s some sketches from @jane from October 2009.

        I used to be squarely in the I-want-my-media-inline camp, but I’ve adjusted that a bit. Certain actions should actually be blocking. Also, since we’re aiming for a super-fast dialog that remembers where you were, speed should not be a factor in repeated actions like inserting multiple images. As the dialog will likely be movable (like internal linking), context also becomes less of a problem.

        Perhaps over time, more things move inline. Uploading, for example, should not be a blocking action. But our goals for 3.5 include separating out the overlapping and confusing workflows, which means individual, contextual dialogs. Moving everything inline at once would be a huge challenge of balancing a desire to create distinct workflows with a small space to work with.

        • andyadams 3:44 pm on July 31, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          Perhaps the blocking and more complex dialogs could be expanded to fill the whole screen, while the simpler and more common tasks (such as inserting an individual image or gallery) could be moved to something more inline, like the customizer?

        • Alex King 12:07 am on August 2, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          > Perhaps over time, more things move inline.

          I’ve considered creating a plugin to provide a pop-over menu of images attached to the post for easy insertion into the content. Perhaps this is an area where some API enhancements (JS to insert, for example) might drive some creative plugins. Some of those ideas might in turn suggest useful enhancements to consider in core.

    • Dominik Schilling (ocean90) 2:03 pm on July 31, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I really like this wireframes, great job.

      One question, is it planned to be able to adjust the image size (maybe via a slider) or to get a list view?

      • Andrew Nacin 2:24 pm on July 31, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        We did discuss the slider idea! We didn’t include it in the wireframes, but it would be a great enhancement to this.

        List view, I am not sure — depends on whether it can be designed to be useful. I would think that the view area itself would be pluggable.

    • sanchothefat 2:06 pm on July 31, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      What considerations are there for other media types? In particular video and audio.

      I can understand the desire to leave creation of things like playlists to plugins but the above wireframes are purely image focused. Will non image files be treated in the same way visually?

      Also how will the above wireframes cope with how the media upload tabs can currently be extended by plugins? For example the ‘Upload’, ‘upload from URL’, ‘Gallery’ and ‘Media Library’ tabs that there are currently? That ability is crucial to some of my plugins.

      • Andrew Nacin 2:48 pm on July 31, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        This will be pluggable, which means a video could show a single frame, audio could have an embedded player, PDF documents could have an image thumbnail, etc. But by default, non-image files will likely be greeted with a generic icon/thumbnail — images first, then everything else.

        I am not yet sure how we will handle tabs added by plugins. What are some examples you have seen or used?

        • sanchothefat 3:20 pm on July 31, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          That sounds fine re. the handling/display of different media types – it’s pretty much what happens now and I agree you’ve got to prioritise this stuff!

          A good example of using media upload tabs out there in the wild that’s widely used would be the JW Player plugin – it lets you create playlists in one of the tabs it adds. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/jw-player-plugin-for-wordpress/

          Also currently I’m working on a plugin that splits out media by type – it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense that all attachments regardless of type appear under ‘Gallery’. My plugin creates tabs for Audio, Video and Other and for audio and video it has a form at the bottom for inserting a playlist shortcode similar to the way galleries are inserted currently.

          I think the new wireframes are great and show a huge improvement to creating & embedding galleries but if possible it’d be good to have some way to see what attachments you’re looking at by source (post/media library) and then also to have them separated by type – Image / Video / Audio / Other.

          Say I’m looking at audio attachments only – the add to gallery button could become ‘Add to playlist’ (assuming it’s feasible to code the gallery functionality in a generic way rather than strictly coding for images). I’d at least like to be able to plug that in if possible.

          Sorry for rambling! Just getting my thoughts down – check out the JW Player plugin anyway

    • Anthony Hortin 2:22 pm on July 31, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Wow. Great work guys! This is looking seriously sweet. Some really nice improvements to the workflow.

      One thing I’d love to see, as @bradyvercher touched on briefly up above, it would be great to be able to link each gallery thumbnail to a individual url. It’d make the gallery functionality much more versatile.

      Looking forward to seeing some or all of these improvements in the next release. Keep up the geat work!

      • Sheri Bigelow 1:59 pm on August 1, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Linking gallery images to outside URLs is a fairly-common request on WordPress.com.

        • Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 2:04 pm on August 1, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          But is that even really a good idea? Too many people don’t know about the dangers of hotlinking as is, and encouraging it …. Okay, I know a lot of that is my buggaboo, but it seems like a bad idea. If flickr etc allow it, then that’s a plugin use-case, so I can see making it pluggable/hookable so a plugin can grab onto it, but I really would hate to see external image inclusion overtly included in core.

          • Anthony Hortin 12:30 am on August 2, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

            I wasn’t actually meaning the ability to include external images. I meant that it would be good to be able to link the thumbnail images to a specific URL (ie. other than just the larger version of the image or the attachment page). For example, It would be handy to have a gallery of 5 images that link to 5 different pages on your site.

    • Ryan Hellyer 7:48 pm on July 31, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      This looks really slick.

      I’m not sure it fits into this particular area of core, but some sort of system to allow us to move attachments between folders would be darned handy. It gets really messy handing large numbers of images if they’re just chucked into folders based on the date they were added.

    • Reji Thomas 8:52 am on August 1, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      This is excellent work!

      Some thoughts:

      • The Gallery workflow could have some extensions. At ‘Create/Edit’ Gallery, show Gallery Title and Description fields, above the Display Properties settings.
      • Bring Gallery Management under the Media > Library. Add an additional listing type ‘ Galleries’ and enable it to be searchable (based on the above). That way a user can quickly identify galleries attached to posts or post types

    • John Smith 9:10 am on August 1, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Looking very, very nice.

      The only thing I had hoped was that the insert button would be moved down into the actual WYSIWYG toolbar. Any reason why we keep it at the top, it’s a little confusing for first-time users until it’s pointed out.

    • wycks 12:38 pm on August 1, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Please consider adding some of the gallery options (http://codex.wordpress.org/Gallery_Shortcode) into the actual UI .Most end -users do not even know about them.

      Also please add as many filters as possible for developers, for example ‘image_size_names_choose’ for the size dropdown, which should work with add_image_size.

      Looks awesome can’t wait because this improves everyone’s experience with wp!

    • Sheri Bigelow 2:39 pm on August 1, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      The Edit Image dialogue seems to be missing, specifically: crop, rotate, flip, and scale.

      • Sheri Bigelow 2:41 pm on August 1, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        I just realized this is in the media library, not the Upload/Insert media workflow. Sorry!!

        • Andrew Nacin 2:44 pm on August 1, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          This screen is reachable from an “Edit Image” button, and buttons to this screen appear in a number of places. But no, we haven’t mocked up the screen yet.

          • Sheri Bigelow 2:50 pm on August 1, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

            Aha, gotcha. It does seem like these are advanced image edit options and some of the things you were planning to cut (i.e. border, target, file URL) might make sense to keep here while removing duplicate edit fields (i.e. title, caption, description).

            • Andrew Nacin 3:16 pm on August 1, 2012 Permalink

              Well, they’re two different workflows. The fields we want to cut are glorified HTML controls that have to do with how an image is presented/displayed in a post. This screen is about modifying the image itself — scaling, cropping, generating thumbnails, etc. Conflated fields and windows are what we’re trying to get away from as much as possible.

    • Jonathan Davis 3:13 pm on August 1, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      On the image dropzone positioned to the left, I realize it is likely a decision based on the most economical use of the space and allowing a clear visual prompt for the user to put it one side or the other. For usability, having it stretch across the bottom (or top) horizontally provides better drag access regardless of the user OS (regardless of whether the host OS keeps files on the left or right). I realize that the vertical screen realestate is at a premium. That makes it a decision of priorities. Is the drag access from left or right important enough to take up that vertical space? Is there a balance in height/size of the dropzone horizontally that won’t chew up too much space but is large enough for clumsy drags? Is left or right enough of a hindrance on usability to be worth taking up vertical simply for the sake of universal access from one side of the browser or the other?I’m not advocating one way or another, just bringing it up for the sake of discussion. Question everything and all that.

      Aside from the problem of the “prompt” (how you prompt the user) with the dropzone, it would be ideal if the entire modal were a dropzone, understanding that may not be possible with how pupload’s mecahnism works, or that it might interfere with the rest of the UI. Still I wonder (thinking out loud) if you could detect the mouse drag and setup the drop zone over top the entire modal area. Probably too divergent a thought to gain traction, but thought I’d share my musings anyhow.

      Good work team. It really is very well thought out. It will be very interesting to see how the user tests go.

      • Daryl Koopersmith 7:20 pm on August 1, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        …it would be ideal if the entire modal were a dropzone…

        It wasn’t shown in the mockups, but this will indeed be the case. It’s certainly possible, and just a matter of getting the UI right.

        • Jonathan Davis 6:42 pm on August 2, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          Well, there you go then. That makes most of my earlierr usability feedback moot. No need to take up precious vertical space on the prompt if the entire modal is a drop zone.

    • gabediaz 3:28 pm on August 1, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      This is fantastic, really great to see all these wireframes and can’t wait to see more.

      Just want to ask if there was any thought about providing a List View with Order Number option when editing/sorting a gallery?

      Starting with Slide 55 the only way to rearrange gallery images seems to be with a drag and drop. This works great for smaller galleries but with larger galleries you’ll find yourself dragging up/down through several slides of your infinite scroll. The currently Media Gallery Screen allows for sorting via order numbers which you can quickly tab through and manually sort with a number.

      Keep up the great work!

      • Daryl Koopersmith 7:27 pm on August 1, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Just want to ask if there was any thought about providing a List View with Order Number option when editing/sorting a gallery?

        We will certainly have to hone the sorting UX. I’m not convinced that manually typing in order numbers is the best possible experience (or necessary). We also will support keyboard-based image organization (with arrow keys). That said, this should be possible in a plugin regardless.

    • Maor Chasen 8:13 pm on August 1, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Wow, what a great work. Can’t describe in words how excited I am to see this great progress!

    • bakaburg1 1:25 am on August 2, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Maybe this is more specific to mac users since stuff tend to pile up on the right side of the desktop, but when i drag and drop stuff I use to mouse in from the right of the window. I wouldn’t find it nice to drag all the way to the other side of the screen.

      I would then suggest to put the drop area, if not on the right which wuold be best for me, on the bottom center, large as much ad the panel, so that you don’t have a preferred dragging side, but this is left up to the users.

      HWR extremely nice work! especially being able to drag directly in the editor!

      One more thing I would is to be able to resize pictures directly in the editor, with text moving away during resizing. Pretty easy to achieve with javascript.

      Is still possible to use external images with URLs?

    • Maor Chasen 12:33 pm on August 3, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Hi, just wanted to ask with what software did you guys create these wireframes? Looks amazing! Thanks!

    • MacItaly 4:28 pm on August 3, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Hi, great work indeed, Media Library needs a deep remake.
      But nobody are interested to upload and organize files in folders/subfolders?
      WP isn’t anymore only a blog and many people use it as CMS and, in those cases, have media organized per year and month it’s useless and have all of them in one folder it’s confusing.
      Should be possible to have an option, on media settings, to enable a folders manager?
      Something that when I upload one or multiple files, I can choose in which folder will be.
      Does it make sense?

    • Dennis Whiteman 7:14 pm on August 3, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Will it be possible when creating a new gallery or uploading files to manage the upload location in the file system in the upload UI? I have some sites with thousands of posts and thousands of images. If I use the built-in media uploader, I end up with thousands of files in a directory. It would be nice for end users to have the option of uploading images within the media upload directory to a new folder with a name of their choosing instead of being limited to segmenting out files only based on date as is currently the option. Another example is that I have a bunch of images that I’d want in a directory called ‘images’ and podcast audio files in a directory called audio, etc.

      This is particularly a problem when migrating from another CMS where the files have been manually uploaded for years. Without some choice in where files go, I usually end up having the client continue to use an ftp program to upload instead of getting the benefits of having an actual media library with meta data that’s provided in WordPress.

      I have conceptualized being able to choose a folder on upload within the existing uploader, but it would be so much better if it were just builtin.

    • lonchbox 11:37 pm on August 4, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Hi!, finally! that part of the WP was too old, all my clients will love this new feature :) Good Job!

    • Ayman Aboulnasr 9:41 am on August 5, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Wow, a very interesting new facelift to the WordPress Images and media handling! Well done guys.

    • Jan Fabry 1:25 pm on August 5, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Have you considered making the individual edit dialog (alignment, caption, alt text, …) non-modal? I was thinking of a floating widget, that would only appear when you have selected an image in the post editor. This gives you instant feedback (alignment, size), and could be extensible (so plugin and theme authors could add or hide controls to suit their client).

      https://img.skitch.com/20120805-ruuippsxadef54fm4qcdcj8guc.png

      This could also solve the problem of “saved in the db/saved in the post”. Everything you edit here is just for this post.

    • hearvox 3:46 pm on August 6, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      This beautiful new Media rewrite might also be an opportunity to look at the way the attachment’s Title text is auto-used in two different ways.

      1. As the post_title of the attachment post, which then is used:
      a. in the Media Library’s column “Title”, and
      b. in many Themes, as HTML text for the H1 and head’s title elements, when displaying the attachment post.

      2. As the title-attribute of the img element when using the “Insert into Post” button.

      #1 is expected behavior, and makes sense-
      an attachment’s Title is meant to be the document title, like any other post..

      #2 is hidden to many users and can make little semantic sense.
      an img’s title attr should: “offer advisory information about the element” (w3c).
      this is often NOT the same as document title

      Perhaps WP might consider adding a field,
      so there’s one for each of the two different “titles”, like:

      Attachment Title * ___________
      Alternate Text __________
      Image Title Text _________

      (and like “alt”, the img “title” wouldn’t be written if this new last field was empty).

      • hearvox 3:46 pm on August 6, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Here’s a couple common use cases that shows why current WP default
        may not be optimum:

        1. You have several versions of an image or scene, you may Title them
        so you can easily distinguish them in Media Library list:
        “Me & Crew: wide-shot”
        “Me & Crew: close-up”
        “Me & Crew: close-up cropped”

        now say you chose not to caption the image,
        but do want some img title text (a tool-tip in many browsers), like:
        “Me and the home-town Crew chilling at WordCamp”

        That’s great “advisory info” but maybe not-as-great a doc title.
        So you must edit HTML manually to make them different.

        2. Imagine the oh-too-frequent case:

        • User uploads image w/ name: image0001.jpg.
        • User does not re-Title attachment, so post_title is: “image0001.jpg”

        so, user gets a poor attachment title, but no harm done.
        until the Insert into Post grabs the post_title field as text for the title element:
        <img title= "image0001.jpg" src="image0001.jpg"…

        now WP's default behavior subjects the whole web to useless/redundant "advisory info".

        if this is something the WP community feels needs amending,
        i'd be happy to start working on the code changes in media.php.

      • Andrew Nacin 8:31 pm on August 7, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        We noticed this double-use of the title as well. We’re simply going to eliminate title attributes from images inserted into posts, and viola! #18984

    • Bruno Costa 8:51 pm on August 6, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I think you only forget the image link.

      The layout is very beautiful, I only think all this page changes won’t please a lot of people.

    • John 5:39 pm on August 8, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Are these rewrites going to be adapted to the Media Library screen itself ( upload.php )?

    • fanderzzon 9:23 am on August 13, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Great work, it’s looks amazing!

      How is the search function working? Are you adding AJAX search so the user automatically get a list of objects/images that matches their search query on the fly?

    • Peter Chester 3:37 pm on August 15, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Great work Daryl!

    • hixen 12:49 pm on August 16, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      This is really awesome, great work.

      Just got one question, are you guys looking into adding more ways to structure your media library? (tags, categories?)

    • jamesmehorter 7:29 pm on August 22, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I would LOVE it if galleries/albums did not need to be linked to a specific post.. but could be if wanted. Many times this is the only reason I will choose NextGen Gallery. PLEASE make NextGen obsolete!

    • Jesper van Engelen 4:36 pm on August 24, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I am very pleased to see that some major changes are finally being made to the media UI, great work on that! I am wondering though: in what way will this affect the countless plugins that change the media interface currently. Many plugins add buttons to the media interface for allowing users to upload media for use in their plugins. This includes many popular plugins such as Advanced Custom Fields and Option Tree – to what extent will these plugins be affected by these changes?

    • kkalvaa 1:16 pm on August 25, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Looks amazing, as people above has said, this alone makes 3.5 one of the key releases to look forward to.

      I think the drop zone should be on the right, in a RTL setting it feels like the second step should be to the right rather than the left.

    • deursmo 11:15 am on August 26, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      This looks great. Discussion here is too ‘technical’ for me but a question about using images in multiple posts. Will it be possible to see in which posts (and pages) one particular image is used? From the editor’s point of view? I don’t mean (nor use) galleries, but perhaps that is the answer. Thanks for all you people make, good whishes.

    • ms-studio 7:59 pm on August 26, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I love that concept, it’s pretty much the best system I could imagine. But I have one big question: how is the default ordering of uploaded files being handled? To me, this is a weak point in the media management, and must be improved.

      Currently, the default is “by upload order”, which means that if you upload a bunch of pics from a photo camera, numbered from 00001 to 00020, the last one (00020) will be on top, the first one (00001) will be at the bottom (because the OS tends to send 00001 first).

      If you want a chronological gallery, you need to reorder them each time.

      Personally, I mostly want the files inside a batch upload to get ordered by filename – 00001 on top, 00020 at the bottom. But if I add a second batch of files, I want them to be added at the bottom of the list! So it’s a very tricky issue to solve …

      I just openend a thread on that topic in trac – http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/21643 – but I believe it’s more appropriate to continue the discussion here.

    • ms-studio 8:31 pm on August 26, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Just a few more words about the “default ordering” issue.

      The wireframes show the ordering option “Sort by upload date”, so I assume that could be the default.

      • Is this really the best default? How is that “upload date” determined if the user batch-uploads multiple files at once?
      • Do we have any stats about how people tend to order their images, in image galleries? Chronologically? By upload date? By file name?
      • “By upload date” doesn’t actually tell what direction is applied. Newest first, or oldest first?
      • If the user changes that setting (let’s imagine that she prefers alphabetic ordering), we must make sure that WP remembers that change and applies it for future uploads.

      To understand the problem I see with the current setting, have a look at that quick demonstration in WP 3.4:
      http://sandbox.4o4.ch/wp/WP-3.4-uploader.swf

      And see here the (much more intuitive) behavior in Facebook:
      http://sandbox.4o4.ch/wp/facebook-uploader.swf

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