Proposal: More Shiny Updates

The Bleak screen of Sadness™ 😢 that users encounter when installing/updating/deleting plugins or themes is a terrible experience WordPress users. It’s not timely anymore and doesn’t reflect the values WordPress strives to adhere to. Instead, WordPress needs a simpler and more straight forward experience when installing, updating, and deleting items.

That’s why the Shiny Updates Team is proposing a merge of the Shiny Updates plugin into WordPress 4.6 💥. We’re eager to hear feedback from WordPress core contributorsCore Contributors Core contributors are those who have worked on a release of WordPress, by creating the functions or finding and patching bugs. These contributions are done through Trac. https://core.trac.wordpress.org. and users alike.

Existing 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 install process, showing The Bleak Screen of Sadness.

Purpose & Goals

The Bleak screen of Sadness™ is disruptive to user workflows, pulling them out of the context of plugins or themes, and dropping them into a screen filled with technical details that most users don’t care about or don’t understand. Shiny Updates deals with these details behind the scenes, maintaining the context of the triggered actions and leaving users with clear actions and results.

This caters to two coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. principles of WordPress, designing for the majority, and striving for simplicity. Users don’t really care about the internal process of installing or updating themes and plugins. Listing out these technical steps for them is unnecessary at best.

With Shiny Updates these actions also don’t require a page reload anymore, which creates a simpler workflow without context changes and lets users achieve their goals of an enhanced WordPress experience quicker.

We also revamped the whole Dashboard -> Updates page to improve simplicity and make the process of updating translations and WordPress core shiny as well. 🎉

Project Background

Whether it was through the update mechanism available under Dashboard -> Updates or the automatic updates introduced in version 3.7, WordPress has always been encouraging users to update their sites to the newest versions.

Plugin updates have been made shiny in WordPress 4.2, but now we want to extend this to other areas as well. Shiny Updates v2 improves the update process for themes, translations and even WordPress itself, as well as install and delete workflows for plugins and themes.
As of today, the plugin has been downloaded about 8,000 times and is actively installed on over 1,000 WordPress sites. We’ve gotten input from many users and core committers through GitHub and during regular meetings in the #feature-shinyupdates.

You can read more about the shiny updates flow with various visual records on make/test, where we also shared results of the various user tests we did. Doing multiple rounds of user testing has really shaped the whole project and helped us refine the plugin and improve the overall usability of installing updates in WordPress.

Implementation Details

Shiny Updates builds upon the shiny plugin updates feature already existing in core, which basically consists of some JavaScriptJavaScript JavaScript or JS is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. WordPress makes extensive use of JS for a better user experience. While PHP is executed on the server, JS executes within a user’s browser. https://www.javascript.com/. and Ajax callbacks for updating plugins in the background. As such, it can easily be extended by the new JavaScript parts of Shiny Updates. All new JavaScript functionality is available under the wp.updates umbrella.

Here’s it looks like in action:

In addition to that, we propose a revamped updates overview under Dashboard -> Updates. It’s simpler, more elegant, more shiny:

With Shiny Updates, the Dashboard -> Updates page gets a much needed overhaul

Relevant Core Tickets

Merging Shiny Updates into core would resolve a long list of outstanding tracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. tickets related to updates, including #31529, #31530, #31531, #31532, #31534, #31535, #31773, #33637 and #35032. All tickets related to Shiny Updates can be found here.

Remaining Issues

There are a few remaining bugs on GitHub, which will be resolved by Friday, June 3rd. Since the revamped updates table relies on plugin icons being returned by the Plugins APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways., the API needs to be changed as part of the plugin directory update. The new directory will launch well before the 4.6 release, so that shouldn’t be a big deal. As a bonus, this change would also enable us to fix #30186.

Contributors and Feedback

This is a proposal and is subject to revision based on your feedback. If you haven’t already tried out the plugin, please download and install it from WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ or the comfort of your WordPress adminadmin (and super admin). You can review the current code and leave feedback at the project’s GitHub repository or in #feature-shinyupdates on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..

Thanks a lot to everyone who has been contributing to this plugin since its inception, especially @obenland for leading this project, @adamsilverstein for his numerous contributions, @mapk for helping with testing and UXUX User experience, and @ocean90 for giving valuable feedback despite being super busy with leading 4.6.

So far we’ve received positive feedback from different core teams like the accessibility and design teams, and we have reached out to @drew who will review the docs once a core patchpatch A special text file that describes changes to code, by identifying the files and lines which are added, removed, and altered. It may also be referred to as a diff. A patch can be applied to a codebase for testing. is ready.

#4-6, #feature-plugins, #merge, #proposal, #shiny-updates