WP Notify Meeting Recap – January 13 2020

This is a recap of the WP Notify meeting held on Monday, January 13, 2020, 14:00 UTC. You can read the meeting discussion here.

We’re resuming our work on the WP Notify project with better focus on actionable ways to address the challenge of notifications in WordPress.

We started by answering more pointed questions as to what the solution must address, and whether a temporary alternative should be entertained at all.

Temporary Solution

@psykro suggested to post a separate tracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker., to improve the current admin_notices implementation, with sample code from @apedog

The benefit to this is that, as a team, we get something into coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. that improves users lives and we gain some real world experience of how the process could be improved by the final solution.

The negative is that it would mean this code is likely to be eventually replaced by our final, better solution. This very discussion, is the reason we want to present this concept to the community, for feedback on whether to a) expand admin_notices, or b) affirm the need for an entirely new replacement solution altogether, and what are the critical elements of that new approach

@schlessera is of the opinion, and rightly so, that any work done to improve the current admin_notices functionality is not worth the time. We should rather work on a solid, scalable and manageable solution for notification channels.

Permanent Solution (From The Onset)

A few of the very direct questions we must address for the replacement solution as suggested by @folleto are

  • What are we replacing? (if anything)
  • What kind of backward compatibility do we need?
  • What’s the minimal 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. and UIUI User interface we need to build for a v1?

As we answer these questions, we’re keeping in mind the end-user experience together with the API required. For example, a notifications menu will need a completely new way of handling notifications in WordPress API through use of the database and rendering those messages.

As @schlessera pointed out “The initial UI should satisfy the 80% need of letting Core/plugins/themes communicate platform state changes within the adminadmin (and super admin) dashboard in a scalable way where the user/user group keeps control.”

Meeting time

During the course of the meeting it became somewhat clear that the time of the meeting might be causing some problems for folks in different time zones. Conversation in the meeting became much more active after the first hour. Therefore we would like to know if the current meeting time is suitable, or if we should consider an alternative?

Next-Steps

Please comment with your thoughts below. You can also add comments your comments in the WP Notifications Project Google Doc under Section 1. “Objectives”

Next 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/. Meeting

📅 Monday, January 20 @ 14:00 UTC

#feature-plugins, #feature-notifications, #summary