AH-O₂ Update 16 Dec, 2013

We had a great meeting today! Shout outs to our newbies @zoerooney, @brainfork and @mdbitz for showing up and volunteering to take some of the load.

doc-bot apparently had a heart attack during our meeting and unfortunately could not attend (which isn’t so great for the having a record of stuff).1

Stuff we’re working on this week

  • @zoerooney and @ubernaut are inventorying existing help contents, identifying what we can use and where

At this time, the plan is to use the existing help content as much as possible, but there may be more appropriate ways to adapt the content to what we’re doing. For example, the edit-comments.php help has a tab for moderating comments, which really just breaks down what each column is for — those could be instead turned into tooltips. There may be other places that are lacking help entirely. We need to identify where the holes are and track what we already have.

@zoerooney and @ubernaut are working on a spreadsheet with all the existing admin pages to start documenting where each one is at: https://docs.google.com/a/jazzsequence.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ArMlUQ8mfETvdFFsb3lUWFN6T1UwSi05djN6a3JleGc&single=true&gid=1&output=html

If you want edit access to the spreadsheet to help contribute, let Zoe or I know.

  • @brainfork is looking into the tooltips and adding them back in. will coordinate with @ninnypants

The tooltips were (temporarily) removed from the codebase because they weren’t checking for the user metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. (at least that’s what I understood). We will be looking at re-adding these back in as well as starting to add them to some new places in the admin.

  • @mdbitz is working on the admin help overviews

Help overviews will appear at the top of each page when the setting is active in the profile settings.

We are happy to have more volunteers — if you are interested in helping in any of the above areas, please get in touch with those involved (or me, if you don’t know how) to coordinate your efforts.

w00t. you guys rock!

Other things that were discussed

Do we want to eliminate an icon to hover over for tooltips altogether? Hover over the element instead?

This would drastically reduce clutter. If users discovered that there were tooltips (e.g. with a short hover delay), they would quickly learn to start hovering over everything if they had questions about a particular setting or element. In this case, we may want to (visually) communicate that tooltips are active and allow people to disable them. Toggle where the current help tab is now?

@melchoyce, in the various things she does, made a number of mockups (that were used for MP6 and CEUX) which replaced the screen options and help tabs with something else. Here are a few examples:

http://melchoyce.com/wpadmin-ui/content-editing.html
http://melchoyce.com/wpadmin-ui/img/dash-screenoptions.png

None of these are currently part of any particular project at the moment. Since I had seen them in CEUX I thought maybe that was where it would go, but I caught Mel on IRC and she said it wasn’t. (Which is actually a good thing, since CEUX is on hiatus.) At some point, it may become a (peripheral) part of AH-O2 to deal with the screen options tab since the two will need to be designed together and implemented at the same time. I would like to use Mel’s mockups as a guide for how we handle our Help tab replacement.

I have code from an earlier admin help experiment that hides the help tab that can be used for both help and screen options when we need them.

My githubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ repo has the code that @ninnypants added but tooltips have been (temporarily) removed.
https://github.com/jazzsequence/WordPress-Admin-Help

We will be having a meeting on Monday Dec 23 17:30 UTC for whoever’s around to meet. After the holidays we can see where we’re at and take another look at the schedule and deadlines.

1 @mdbitz was able to provide a transcript of the meeting for anyone who missed it:

#admin-help, #ah-o2