Revisions Update, 2/19

Following two consecutive days of office hours, we’ve reached a consensus on what the UIUI User interface should be for comparing a single revision to the current version of a post:

comparing-one

Based on the above mockup from @karmatosed, @adamsilverstein is continuing development of the new revisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision. interface on ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. #23497.

Once we have an acceptable, working prototype, we’ll revisit how to present the interface for comparing two different revisions. @nacin suggested, and we generally agreed, that a single slider with two grabbers would likely be a workable approach, but we’ll discuss that further once the above interface is implemented.

No progress to report on the other tickets scoped for 3.6 as we’ve been focused on UI lately.

[IRC log]

#3-6, #revisions

Revisions Update, 2/18

We’ve scheduled an additional office hours for Tuesday, February 19, at 2000 UTC in #wordpress-dev.

During today’s meeting, we reviewed @adamsilverstein’s prototype on #23497, which led to a lengthy discussion about how the prototype related to our mockups, specifically https://core.trac.wordpress.org/attachment/ticket/23396/revisions9.png.

@karmatosed will prepare a revised mockup for tomorrow that incorporates the slider introduced in #23497, and @adamsilverstein will tweak the prototype as well so that comparing a revision to the current version is the default behaviour.

The feeling is that we’re straying from our intended goals, and I didn’t want to wait until our Thursday office hours to refocus. After tomorrow’s meeting, I’ll post a more detailed recap of where the RevisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision. team stands.

[IRC log]

#3-6, #revisions

Revisions Update, 2/11

As has been the case for many sessions now, Monday’s revisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision. office hours focused on changes to the UIUI User interface. @karmatosed provided new mockups, influenced by a thread on the Accessibility blog. @adamsilverstein also posted a series of patches on #23396 that begin to implement the general direction we’ve chosen for UI updates (aside: we’ll do our best to keep future mockups on this ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker., for easier discovery; until now, most have been posted in the comments on these update threads). We are certainly approaching a consensus on the new design, but have held off on any significant UI-specific coding until we’re confident that our efforts won’t be wasted.

Beyond UI, there are patches on three tickets that could use testing: #16215, #22289, and #19932. @adamsilverstein and @westi are working on unit tests, which should help move the 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. review along.

We should have new mockups to review during tomorrow’s office hours at 1500 UTC in #wordpress-dev.

[IRC log]

#3-6, #revisions

Revisions Update, 2/7

We started today’s office hours by reviewing @karmatosed’s latest mockups for the revisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision. screen. We’re in agreement that these reflect the direction we’ll take, so @adamsilverstein will begin coding the changes in preparation for Monday’s meeting. As some concerns have been raised about the use of red and green, @karmatosed will post to the Accessibility group’s P2 asking for feedback on the current mockups. She will also explore the use of patterns to differentiate additions and deletions, as suggested by @helen.

@westi made a few suggestions, based on his recent experiences with Revisions, which we’ve agreed to incorporate. For clarity, the current version will be included in the revisions list to provide a stronger connection with the overall revisions workflow. Second, we decided that when first landing on the revision screen for a given post, we should show the diff of the current version and its immediate predecessor revision; since most users are probably looking for this anyway, why not save them a step?

Lastly, we chatted about the status of code-oriented tickets scoped for 3.6. A few (#16215, #22289, and #19932) have patches, which we’ll be reviewing and providing feedback on before Monday’s meeting. With any luck, we can land at least one in CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. before the next dev chat. Beyond that, development on the remaining tickets should progress over the weekend, with the aim of having more patches to review for our next office hours.

For reference, the tickets that are in scope for 3.6 (at least at this point), can be found here.

[IRC Log]

#3-6, #revisions

Revisions Update, 2/5

Yesterday’s meeting focused on revisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision. to the revisions interface :). @lessbloat joined us to ask some great questions, and helped refocus the UIUI User interface changes that have been proposed and mocked up so far. We started off by trying to identify the major uses of revisions, and settled on two primary cases: undoing mistakes by finding the last correct revisions, and reviewing changes as part of an editorial workflow.

In light of those focuses, we’ve decided to revisit the UI mockups we’ve (namely, @karmatosed and @adamsilverstein) worked on so far. The general consensus is that they’ve become overly complicated, and led to feature creep (looking at you, line-by-line accept/reject capabilities). @karmatosed is working on some new mockups for Thursday’s office hours. One possible source of inspiration may be @benbalter’s post forking plugin.

On the code side, @mdawaffe worked out a pretty comprehensive 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. for the display of incorrect authors on revisions (#16215). We’ll be reviewing that, along with the patches added to the other tickets we’ve scoped for 3.6. As was the case when I last posted, progress is slow at this point due to travel and the ongoing UI discussions.

[IRC log]

#3-6, #revisions

Revisions Update(s) for Last Week

These are combined and late (sorry).

Last week we had two successful Office Hours discussions:

  • Monday – https://irclogs.wordpress.org/chanlog.php?channel=wordpress-dev&day=2013-01-28&sort=asc#m541769
  • Thursday – https://irclogs.wordpress.org/chanlog.php?channel=wordpress-dev&day=2013-01-31&sort=asc#m544313

We discussed the different mockups that both @adamsilverstein and @karmatosed have been working on with the discussions in the first meeting leading to some new mockups here: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2013/01/25/revision-update-125/#comment-7869

And then @karmatosed created some further mockups after our second meeting bringing together our feedback and the different idea threads:

Outside of the meetings our progress has been slow because most of us have been travelling for conferences / meetups

Our next office hours are today at 16:00 UTC

#3-6, #revisions

Revisions Update, 1/25

Yesterday, the revisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision. team had its second scheduled office hours chat in #wordpress-dev at 1600 UTC. @karmatosed and I were both afk, and our first chat was earlier this week, so it was a short meeting [IRC log].

@nacin popped in to mention that he’ll be working on the 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. for draft changes to published content. This will overlap with, but shouldn’t take away from, the revisions efforts our team is working on. For reference, the ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker.’s we’ve scoped for 3.6 are listed here.

Overall, progress this week has been tentative, mostly focused around #16215 and #16847; thanks to @adamsilverstein for his efforts on those tickets thus far. A big area of focus in the near-term will be the UIUI User interface improvements—there’s been a fair bit of discussion on this front in the comments here and here.

Our next meeting is Monday, January 28, at 1600 UTC. At the moment, our office hours on Thursdays conflictconflict A conflict occurs when a patch changes code that was modified after the patch was created. These patches are considered stale, and will require a refresh of the changes before it can be applied, or the conflicts will need to be resolved. with the Post Formats team, so one of us will have to move. We’ll keep the hours listed in the sidebarSidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme. updated as we move forward.

#3-6, #revisions

Revisions Update, Jan 22nd

This week the revisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision. team had our first in-person meeting and we started by setting out office hours for this cycle which are 4pm UTC on Mondays and Thursdays. We then went through and reviewed a large number of open tracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. tickets related to revisions to get a feel for the existing bugs and enhancementenhancement Enhancements are simple improvements to WordPress, such as the addition of a hook, a new feature, or an improvement to an existing feature. requests as well as to set down a line as to what we feel is and isn’t in scope.

We ended our review with 8 “in-scope” existing tickets:

Bugs:

  • #16215 – Post Revision history displays the incorrect author
  • #20982 – Attribution of changes via edit_last after restore
  • #16847 – Capability check fails for 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. revision edit (& map_meta_cap no good)
  • #9843 – Duplicate autosave/revisions clutter the database

Enhancements:

  • #/22289 – FilterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. to override WP_POST_REVISIONS (or define it later)
  • #19932 – More context when display revision info for plugins
  • #18733 – Show revision number for post/pages in Revision list
  • #7237 – Multiple clean_post_cache() calls when saving a post due to post revisions

We explicitly left the following out of scope:

  • #9681 – Add 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. to allow a 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 to support the deletion of unneeded revisions
  • #20564 – Post 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. Revisions
  • #20299 – Preview changes on a published post makes all post meta “live”
  • #11049 – Page Preview does not autosave page template

After the trac ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. discussion we then talked about UIUI User interface ideas and set ourselves some goals for this week:

  • More UI mockups – to come in the comment thread here
  • Start investigating and addressing some of the bugs

Full logs of our IRCIRC Internet Relay Chat, a network where users can have conversations online. IRC channels are used widely by open source projects, and by WordPress. The primary WordPress channels are #wordpress and #wordpress-dev, on irc.freenode.net. Chat are here

#3-6, #revisions

Revisions Update, for 18th Jan 2013

As Aaron posted before the revisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision. team has two clear focuses:

  • Fixing the Author Attribution issue – #16215
  • Improving the usability of the differences for the average user.

So far most of our discussion has been in the comment thread of Aarons post and I want to catch up on the in-person discussion and start in earnest on fleshing out the direction.

To that end I’m going to spend the majority of Monday the 21st working through the current ideas and also reviewing any revisions related tracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. tickets to pull together our direction and I invite all interested parties to join me for a discussion session starting at 1400 UTC on #wordpress-dev.

It would be great if @karmatosed, @ethitter, @adamsilverstein could all be there and we can also arrange when our regular office hours will be.

#3-6, #revisions

WordPress 3.6: Revisions

RevisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision. are an extremely powerful tool for content tracking, but there are a few parts that need a little TLC. Ever since they were first introduced, there’s been a problem with proper author attribution on revisions (see #16215), and we’re going to take a crack at fixing that in 3.6. Additionally, while the current diffs are pretty cool, and make a lot of sense to those of us that look at diffs everyday, there’s a lot of room for improvement for your average user. We’d like to see some UIUI User interface improvements around the diffs as well as information that makes more sense to an average content creator (words changed, a visual representation of what was added/removed, prettier output, etc).

@markjaquith and I chose @westi to lead this. I’m excited to see the improvements on this one! There’s a little of everything in this project, so please leave a comment if you’re interested in lending a hand.

#3-6, #revisions