We recently posted a proposal for a speaker feedback tool to be baked into WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. sites. The proposal included some ideas and mockups, with a call for feedback, suggestions and questions. Thanks to @adityakane, @imath, @andreamiddleton, @hlashbrooke, @karmatosed, @iandunn, @mrwweb, @dimensionmedia, @samsuresh and @wpfangirl for their input on that post.

Based on the feedback from that post, we have some more refined mockups to share with you, courtesy of @karmatosed. In addition to that, we are looking for input on the data storage method here, so check out the mockups and details below.

Front-end views

Initial view before selecting a talk to give feedback on:

Full form view after selecting a talk:

Dashboard views

The following mockups are based on the idea that we would store the feedback in a new custom post typeCustom Post Type WordPress can hold and display many different types of content. A single item of such a content is generally called a post, although post is also a specific post type. Custom Post Types gives your site the ability to have templated posts, to simplify the concept. with each feedback item being a separate post in that type.

List table view of feedback items in the dashboard:

Single view of the feedback post in the dashboard:

Considerations

The main decision that needs to be made at this stage is regarding how the feedback data will be stored. The three options are:

#1 Custom post type

This would appear as shown in the mockups above. Feedback would be stored in individual posts within a new custom post type.

Pros:

• Uses existing WordPress APIs, so no need for custom data structures
• Easy to extend with further features at a later date
• Familiar UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing.

Cons:

• Some WordCamp sites could get thousands of feedback items for a single event, this could slow everything down and make for a very tedious UI to look through for feedback items.
• Individual feedback items would require a click through to a new page in order to view them

#2 Comments

This would involve storing the feedback as comments on the session post using a custom comment type and comment metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress..

Pros:

• Uses existing WordPress APIs, so no need for custom data structures
• Easy to extend with further features at a later date
• Familiar UI (this would use the edit-comments.php template in the dashboard
• Dashboard comments view allows for full feedback content to be viewed in the list table, without a new page load
• Feedback is effectively a comment, so this would be a logical way of storing the data

Cons:

• Custom comment types and comment meta have historically been tricky to work with (although I think this has been largely fixed in recent CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. releases)

#3 Custom database table

This would involve writing a custom data structure in custom database tables – the exact data structure and dashboard UI would still need to be planned out.

Pros:

• Flexibility of building things exactly how we want it, in the most performant way possible
• UI can be as optimised as possible

Cons:

• Lots of development hours for planning and building
• Dashboard UI would likely be unfamiliar and less predictable
• Custom database tables on a large multisiteMultisite Multisite is a WordPress feature which allows users to create a network of sites on a single WordPress installation. Available since WordPress version 3.0, Multisite is a continuation of WPMU or WordPress Multiuser project. WordPress MultiUser project was discontinued and its features were included into WordPress core.https://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network. instance can be unpredictable

Questions and Feedback

With all of that in mind, please comment with your thoughts on the following:

1. Which data structure do you think would be a good fit for session feedback?
2. Is there anything further that you feel should be included in the feedback form for attendees?

#proposal, #speaker-feedback, #tools