Design meeting notes April 15, 2020

These are the weekly notes for the design meeting that happens on Wednesdays. 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.

First off, housekeeping. We still need people to help out with taking these notes. You don’t need to have deep knowledge or be around a lot, an hour of your time is all it takes. Leave a comment below!

In two weeks we’ll have another Show and Tell Zoom meeting, let us know if you want to show something that you’re working on or want feedback on.

Next, @michael-arestad 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/. Here is some of what has been happening over the last week (and is not comprehensive):

Then, @joen and @empireoflight show off a new proposed update to dashicons, adding a ton of new icons! The question now is how to move forward. Gutenberg uses SVGs directly inline, vs the dashicons font that the rest of WordPress uses. Dashicons are widely used, but the bigger it grows, the heavier its size becomes. SVGs solve that, and there is work being done to make an icon component in Gutenberg. But they are mostly geared for a javascriptJavaScript JavaScript or JS is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. WordPress makes extensive use of JS for a better user experience. While PHP is executed on the server, JS executes within a user’s browser. https://www.javascript.com/.-based environment like the block editor.

Everyone seemed to be on board for moving forward with an SVG-based icon approach (but the current dashicons implementation will continue to exist for people relying on it), so a post will be written soon detailing the plan and next steps. Look out for that!

Next, WCEU 2020 is coming up, and it is going ahead full steam fully online. That also means a new type of contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/., fully remote, so we need a plan for that. @estelaris will write a post to gather ideas, so start thinking!

@ibdz chimes in reporting that the Figma documentation is almost ready to merge into the Handbook, and suggested looking at the general flow and ordering. @hedgefield was thinking of this too and made a start working out a new page structure. Together with @estelaris they will make a 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. card and dump ideas into that for further exploration.

Finally, @michael-arestad brought to our attention this issue: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2020/04/14/editor-chat-agenda-15-april-2020/#comment-38463 and @ninjastar volunteered to help out.