Discussion: About the About page

For each new major WordPress release, a unique “About” page is created that showcases features from that release cycle. It’s a chance to provide an overall summary of what’s new. As a fairly self-contained project (in scope as well as time), the About page could offer an opportunity for design contributors to support the release of a new iteration of WordPress.

However, there are currently some challenges in the process of designing this page:

  • The code of the About page is complicated and limiting. This means that the designer working on it often has to partner with a front-end developerFront-end developer Front-end web development is the practice of producing HTML, CSS and JavaScript for a website or a web application which a user can view and interact directly. aware of the various constraints, and not many front-end developers with that knowledge are available.
  • Each new release’s design is often done by one designer, without a unifying guide. This can result in either stagnation of style, or huge stylistic changes between releases.
  • There is also very little documentation on how to get involved and work on the About page.
  • The design and development happens in TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/., so you either need to find the ticket there or spot it in a coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. chat, to know the process is underway… and then you need to be comfortable working with Trac.
  • It’s hard to contribute, both for the reasons above and because often, the page is created in the last week of the release cycle.

This all sounds a bit bleak, so let’s talk about how we could fix it! 

Let’s start by having a discussion about what we, as a design team, can do to make this process streamlined, clearer, and easy to get involved with.

I have a few discussion points to get us thinking:

  • What if the CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. system was rebuilt from the ground up, using components, so it’s easier to develop each release?
  • What if we used a unified style or theme for design moving forward? Maybe it could draw on the WordPress jazz heritage?
  • What if that style was translated into a style guide anyone could use in the future?
  • What if, at the beginning of every new release cycle, a call for an About page designer was put out?
  • Your awesome idea here!

Let’s continue the discussion in the comments. In a week, I’ll summarize the discussion and post the next steps.