Meeting notes

If you didn’t get to attend our meeting in 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/. this week, don’t worry! That’s what these notes are for. You can see the previous agenda, and follow the Slack chat log.

Housekeeping

Research & recommendations

There are so many great data points and insights here from the research the team has done with WordPress. It’s a treasure trove, thanks to everyone for the work, and it’s well worth checking out. We discussed having a walkthrough of the work. Keep an eye out for that!

What’s next for Dashicons?

We’d love to hear some thoughts on this post. We had a great meeting last week, and a thorough followup, walking through where we’re at with icons in WordPress, and where we can take things from here.

Updates

Create style guide for future WordPress pages

Tremendous work has gone into giving a guide for designers or developers to quickly create new pages based on work that’s been done previously. This is really helpful! We discussed in our meeting the work involved to convert the guides to Figma files, as the WordPress design team is able to use Figma for free, and it supports more collaborative design work.

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/ Nav blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience.

We’d love your feedback on all the hard work the team has put into suggesting various approaches to creating a Nav block in Gutenberg. For clarity the work has been broken into five individual issues for discussion.

  1. What happens when I add a menu? (smart defaults, onboarding)
  2. How do I add an item to my menu? (child blocks, link interface, types of content to include)
  3. How do I edit that menu item? (renaming, settings)
  4. How do I rearrange items in my menu? (ordering, hierarchy, sub-menus, still in progress, although this is starting to come up in 3 and 5)
  5. How are menus and menu items presented visually? (focussed state, horizontal/vertical styling)

Feedback on any and all of the issues is welcome. The biggest challenge right now is trying to fit all the complex interactions of a navigation menuNavigation Menu A theme feature introduced with Version 3.0. WordPress includes an easy to use mechanism for giving various control options to get users to click from one place to another on a site. into the block area. The team is also trying to follow the principle of putting as much in-context settings next to the block area, and avoiding too many settings 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..

A great point was brought up about ensuring 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) is thought of and included in these early stages. We briefly discussed what this could look like, and the design team wants to continually be proactive in soliciting feedback from the accessibility team.

Discussion about bringing it all together (Slack link)

We discussed some of the challenges with making complex Nav blocks, and where the different settings should sit. If you have time, feel free to jump into Slack and read through it; these thoughts are very much in progress, so additional feedback is welcome!

Design feedback

We’d love feedback on a new WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. PWA proposal.

#meeting-notes