Weekly design meeting notes of Wednesday November 14, 2018

A new week, a new design meeting in CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.! If you haven’t jumped in we wholeheartedly recommend joining the group and lending your thoughts and feedback. We meet each week to chat about the things our team can focus on. Following are the main points we discussed today:

TrelloTrello Project management system using the concepts of boards and cards to organize tasks in a sane way. This is what the make.wordpress.com/marketing team uses for example: https://trello.com/b/8UGHVBu8/wp-marketing.

The labels have been and board have been simplified as a first pass. Feedback is welcome. At this point we’ll likely put it through its paces and see if any tweaks are needed. Feel free to jump in and take a look

  • Meeting discussion: topic to bring up in meeting
  • Waiting: something blocked.
  • Needs review: something that needs input, doesn’t have to be in meeting.
  • Needs decision: could be from someone in team but also doesn’t have to be in meeting.
  • Critical: something very important to get done, high priority task. (edited)

Labels removed:

  • Needs designer: if it’s not in progress it should be seen as needs one, no need for label.
  • Needs discussion: meeting has discussion 

Testing

WordPress 5.0 is coming, let’s all take time to test as designers can help a lot with testing.

We are amazing at breaking things!
Test on all your devices, test on walks using mobile data, test with throttling, test with themes/plugins.

Test all the things!

Office Hours

The office hours aren’t currently working well, as we haven’t had attendance. So we’re going to drop them for now and likely revisit next year.

About page

Every release we have an awesome about page that celebrates and informs on changes that have happened. 

We discussed the page itself and its need to show off the features of GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ with text and images/gifs. 

We’d love to have browser testing, responsive testing, and a11yAccessibility 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) (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)) testing today. 

You’re welcome to jump in and take a look at the in progress work. Once text strings are finalized we can get this over to the polyglot team for translation.

Readme for themes

We discussed (Slack link) the proposal for adding a readme to themes, similar to how plugins works today.

The basic TL;DR is – plugins allow for a readme, to share more from 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 creators; let’s do the same for the themes. Design support is needed where Core shows the readme for themes.


Word of advice: never use the word final in a design file. It will always come back to bite you. 

#meeting-notes