Admin Help: 30 September 2013

Here’s the recap:

• @siobhan is expecting a contact from a support rep at Zurb re: free Verify account for us.
• We’re still looking for mockups of ideas

Some further notes:

This is a really difficult task.
A lot of folks have tried various angles for handling this and it hasn’t produced a surefire answer. #21273 which was referenced last week by @DrewAPicture and can be seen in a close approximation in Codestyling Localization is an idea that cropped up around the same time as the admin help link in the admin bar discussions circa 3.5 development. However, from our user testing, the admin bar help ended up not faring so well. Which leaves us back to the beginning.

Know someone that would like to help? Invite them!
We’re a small group, which is great, but I feel like we need some left-field ideas that haven’t been tried before. If nothing else, looking at horrible ideas can help guide us toward something less horrible. 🙂 So invite anyone who may have a passing interest to the IRC chats or this P2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/. and I’ll pretend I didn’t just call their ideas horrible.

Mockups > patches
If anyone is wondering why I’m asking for mockups rather than patches, it’s because I think it’s easier to see whether something is a good idea or not visually. Things can get tossed out or dug into deeper before writing a line of code. I think we have a lot of more design-minded folks on this team, which is another factor, but also when we’re trying to communicate ideas to users, they are going to be more likely to respond to something visual and a mockup would be something we can show people without spending a lot of time writing a patch. So there’s that. Nothing against the folks who’ve written patches for admin help stuff when this has come up before, just trying to take a different angle and see what comes up.

On the other hand, if anyone is reading this and wants to contribute a patch, create a tracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. ticket, link to it here, and I’ll check it out (and take screenshots, if necessary, so it can be presented alongside the other mockups).

Also of note, our meeting time now exists 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. thanks to @siobhan. 🙂

#3-8, #admin-help