Hey UI gang Here to help you wind…

Hey, UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. gang. Here to help you wind down the week is the latest update to MP6, version 1.2.

We’ve been focusing primarily on solving some of the trickiest responsive questions this week. Some we’ve found solutions to, and some we’re still discussing. We’ve also got a wild idea for the front-end of the site that we’ve got some mockups of to discuss.

Here’s what’s new this week:

  • A new position for the “hamburger” button that opens/closes the mobile menu. It’s now part of the adminbar, and stays put when scrolling the rest of the page. There’s a much more obvious active style, and we’ve greatly increased the reliability of the button (no more multiple taps to get it to open anymore!).
  • Increased the size of wpadminbar dropdown menus for mobile sizes so that links are easier to tap. (We still need to work on making these easier to close without activating a link).
  • Improvements to the media uploader for responsive. Still needs work, but is more functional now.
  • Fixed buglets appearing because of Jetpack’s 2x retinafying code interfering with MP6.
  • Better positioning of icons in the wpadminbar.
  • Improved responsive layout on the Akismet configuration page.
  • Added new icon glyphs to the Dashicons font.
  • Reworked the way Open Sans is declared in the 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.
  • Fixes to checkboxes and radio buttons.

Once we decided that the adminbar was the best possible place to put the hamburger button for mobile, I started thinking about whether that same interaction might make sense on the desktop version of the dashboard. After all, we’ve already got a button that hides and shows the dashboard, it’s just always been at the bottom of the menu. What if we put it at the top, in the adminbar? The benefit would be that even desktop users would grow to understanding the meaning of the button, since its purpose, hiding or showing the menu, is the same whether you’re on desktop or mobile. If we took it that far, it could even go to the front end of your site; allowing access to any part of your blog’s dashboard within two clicks of your live site. This would be a bigger change than what we can do with just CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. in MP6, so it’s a topic we’re interested in your thoughts on, to see if it’s a good candidate for a potential coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. patch suggestion.

This week’s edition of MP6 includes contributions from Joen Asmussen, Mel Choyce, Ben Dunkle, Till Krüss, Andy Peatling, and myself. Many thanks, as always, to those of you who have shared your feedback and ideas with us so far. Keep them coming!

We’ll be in #wordpress-ui on Freenode May 20, 2013 at 18:00 UTC to discuss this week’s work; please meet us there if you’d like to chat about what’s new.

#mp6