Design meeting notes for April 1st 2020

These are the weekly notes for the design meeting that happens on Wednesday’s. You can read the full transcript on our Slack channel and find the meeting’s agenda here. You can join the 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/. channel by following the instructions in our handbook.

@karmatosed started off with the announcement that @estelaris has been chosen as a new team repTeam Rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts. for the design team! Congratulations! She will take on such responsibilities as facilitating team meetings, managing our task inbox and triage, and keeping everyone up-to-date on what’s happening in WordPress design.

Next, @mapk updates us on 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/. WordPress 5.4 dropped recently which includes a bunch of neat Gutenberg improvements:

  • Default fullscreen mode.
  • New blocks: Social links 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., Buttons block.
  • Inline text color change.
  • Gradients for Cover block and Buttons block.
  • Latest Posts now has featured images.
  • Color options on Group and Columns blocks.
  • Block breadcrumbs.
  • MOBILE: Toolbar stays on top.
  • Easier image sizing in Gallery.
  • Table block captions.

The focus for Gutenberg development in April was posted and includes:

  • Full Site Editing: Continue improving the Edit Site screen and blocks
  • Global Styles: This will be a big one this month (support in blocks and 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.)
  • Updated Inserter UI to support patterns and blocks
  • Updated Navigation/Menus screen
  • Continue G2 iterations

Then, @ibdz chimes in with an update on the Figma documentation for the Handbook. This is intended for new contributors to understand our process of designing in Figma. If you have experience with Figma, please leave your feedback in this doc. We will review next week and then put it in the Handbook.

Next, @audrasjb asked us to review the design of the automatic updates feature pluginFeature Plugin A plugin that was created with the intention of eventually being proposed for inclusion in WordPress Core. See Features as Plugins., in order to get it ready for a merge proposal. More information can be read in this Make post.

Finally, @ibdz spots a tiny bug in the Handbook and @paaljoachim links to a small change to the block toolbar for review.

#meeting-notes