Introduced in 3.1 as the Admin Bar, the Toolbar is WordPress’ interface for quickly accessing content editing and site configuration tools such as the site list, CustomizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings., user settings, and post and page creation and editing.

Discussion about development on the Toolbar takes place in WordPress TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress., 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/, and in the #core and #design channels on WordPress Slack.

Tickets in this component are directly related to wp-includes/admin-bar.php, wp-includes/class-wp-admin-bar.php, PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 5.6.20 or higher and JSJS JavaScript, a web scripting language typically executed in the browser. Often used for advanced user interfaces and behaviors. 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. improvements, UIUI User interface/UXUX User experience changes, new features, and improvements to the Toolbar internals.

New contributors are always welcome, whether you’re a seasoned developer, designer, blogger, tester, or “beginner” looking to contribute for the first time.

Recent Changes

• AccessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) (and localization) improvements were added in 4.5 through the addition of lang and dir attributes for menu items. See ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. #33513 for details.
• You can find a list of changes, broken out by WordPress version, on this Trac report.

What’s Next

• Improve accessibility of links (see #33513).
• Improve the usability of long menus, especially when multiple plugins add to the UI (see #33574).
• Revamp the toolbar to improve usability. See #32678 for iterations and discussion.

Labs

Sometimes you just need to tinker around and see what’s possible. These are some experiments that folks are working on that you might want to try out.

• WP Toolbar Experiments is an experimental 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 for modifying aspects of the toolbar UI. It’s a great playground for testing “what if?” scenarios.