DASH – 3.8 proposal – Make WordPress Core

Welcome!

The WordPress coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. development team builds WordPress! Follow this site for general updates, status reports, and the occasional code debate. There’s lots of ways to contribute:

Found a bugbug A bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority.? Create a ticket in the bug tracker.

Want to contribute? Get started quickly with tickets marked as good first bugs for new contributors or join a bug scrub. There’s more on the reports page, like patches needing testing, and on feature projects page.

Other questions? Here is a detailed handbook for contributors, complete with tutorials.

Prerequisite: Must have latest version of MP6 installed and activated.
PluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party link: https://github.com/growthdesigner/wp-dash

Visual comparison

The existing dashboard (the page you see by default when you log into WordPress) looks like this:

It hasn’t been touched in years, leaving it feeling a tad bloated, and dated. Here’s what the dashboard looks like with our plugin enabled:

What’s changed?

We tackled 5 major areas, and made them each separate includes within our plugin (separate php, js, and css files).

We combined “WordPress Blogblog (versus network, site)”, “Other WordPress News”, and “Plugins” to form the new simplified “WordPress News” plugin.
We merged “Recent Comments” into the new “Activity” widgetWidget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user., which now also shows you any scheduled posts and your most recently published posts.
We converted “QuickPress” into “Quick Drafts” putting the emphasis more on drafting ideas than publishing, and we merged in “Recent Drafts”.
We removed the “Number of columns” screen option. Instead the dashboard is now responsive, and shows the appropriate number of columns based on your screen resolution.
The Right Now widget was visually reduced.

Here are a few extras:

We removed incoming links (which doesn’t seem to really work anymore).
We replaced the “Dashboard” H2 title with a fun group of friendly welcome text and idioms.
We added a bunch more hooksHooks In WordPress theme and development, hooks are functions that can be applied to an action or a Filter in WordPress. Actions are functions performed when a certain event occurs in WordPress. Filters allow you to modify certain functions. Arguments used to hook both filters and actions look the same. for greater extensibility from any of the dashboard widgets.
There’s a fun little smiley if you delete all posts and comments

What problem is your feature pluginFeature Plugin A plugin that was created with the intention of eventually being proposed for inclusion in WordPress Core. See Features as Plugins. trying to solve?

While functional, WordPress’ dashboard page hasn’t kept up with the rest of WordPress. We mean to improve the experience of the first page of WordPress. Streamline it, clean it up looking at all the widgets, and make it responsive.

We’d also love to see future development in the new activity widget, where plugin developers can add more “activity stream” related content.

What other potential solutions did you explore?

If you work backwards through https://make.wordpress.org/ui/tag/dash/ you’ll get a pretty good idea. We met weekly in IRC, and brainstormed/iterated daily via our Skype channel.

Have you done user testing?

Nope, but if this get’s the “all clear”, we’re more than happy to do that.

#3-8, #core-plugins, #dashboard, #feature-plugins, #proposal

Anonymous User 10:11 pm on October 23, 2013

Your GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ link has no link in the href attribute and just points to the current page…
- Sam Sidler 10:13 pm on October 23, 2013
  
  Thanks for catching that. Fixed.
Mel Choyce 10:25 pm on October 23, 2013
Louy Alakkad 10:24 am on October 24, 2013

Amazing, I like the idea. Except the H2 thing 🙂
- lessbloat 6:43 pm on October 24, 2013
  
  Thank you. Ya, that’s the one thing I’m still on the fence on as well.
portfola 5:21 pm on October 24, 2013

This is way cool, thanks!
- lessbloat 6:43 pm on October 24, 2013
  
  Thanks for the feedback. 🙂
memuller 6:18 pm on October 24, 2013

I’ve been testing this pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party on my WordPress networknetwork (versus site, blog) for a couple of weeks. I didn’t collect hard data, but I’ve heard a few things informally.

Feedback has been, broadly, of three kinds:
— people don’t notice the change unless it’s mentioned; but once they do, they’re happy about it.
— people don’t notice the change, and are neutral about it – they think it’s not a significant improvement, or that they won’t use it anyway.
— people notice the change, and are happy about it.

I think that not noticing the change is an issue, but it’s hard to avoid that – most users in this installation are already “trained” to ignore the Dashboard, since it’s not useful for them (without custom widgets).

Some users noticed the change due to the absence of the “Right Now” widgetWidget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user. and its characteristic coloured numbers for comment status – apparently, they draw the eye more than I thought.

It’s interesting to note that, once I started using MP6 in this same network many months ago, quite a few users mentioned how the dashboard looked “clunky” and outdated when compared to the much more modern interface.

Overall, I’m quite happy with the results. I liked some of the initial ideas for this project a lot, but most of them were discarded in favor of a less groundbreaking approach – which was a good move (albeit a sad one); since the result now is a clear, faultless, solid and expansible improvement. It’s hard to argue against it.
- lessbloat 6:49 pm on October 24, 2013
  
  This feedback is amazing! Thank you for being so detailed/descriptive. I feel like you summed it up really well in your final paragraph. While I would have loved to have had some of that other stuff as well, I’m content to see this as a good stepping stone for even more awesome stuff down the line.
Eric Andrew Lewis 10:06 pm on November 3, 2013

The changes here all make sense to me.
demoman2k10 3:17 pm on November 22, 2013

Love all the changes please tell me someone is looking at an overhaul of the Plug-in… This is way outdated and would be great to have some better abilities to SEARCH Plug-in’s by Support for version, Newest and other methods. Would like to see it work and function more like one of the stores offered by Apple, Microsoft or Google even. A section for paid and free would be nice as well. As nothing is more frustrating then downloading something that doesn’t work unless you pay for it.
Anonymous User 1:36 am on November 25, 2013

the new dash which shows up in 3.8 betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. 1 is now even more useless. at least an option to add multiple rss feeds to the dashboard in seperate boxes. i used the other wordpress news box but never cared for the wordpress updates box or the plugins and now its kinds forced apon me
allm 2:22 am on December 15, 2013

“We removed the “Number of columns” screen option. Instead the dashboard is now responsive, and shows the appropriate number of columns based on your screen resolution.”

Well, the way it is build now does not feel like the appropriate number of colmns is chosen. If the adminadmin (and super admin)-area shows up on a wide screen and there are only 2 active columns, I still see 4 columns. The 2 on the right are not used, and the 2 on the left are really narrow.

Actually, if I decrease the width of the browser window to the point where there are only 3 columns my active columns are getting wider.

I would propose either:

. get the ‘number of columns’ screen option back
OR
. set the appropriate number of columns as is done now BUT NEVER MORE THAT THE ACTUAL NUMBER OF COLUMNS.
- Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 5:54 pm on December 15, 2013
  
  I second ‘Please bring back the numbers’ – Have the default be to auto-adjust, but some of us liked having the choice 🙂