Tag Archives: ah-o2

Chris Reynolds 11:18 pm on December 30, 2013
Tags: , , ah-o2   

AH-O₂ Update – Last meeting of 2013

We had a good AH-O2 meeting this morning. Thanks to everyone who was able to make it. If you weren’t able to make it but want to get involved in any of the areas discussed in this post, head over to the Google Group to get involved in the discussion.

Docs tasks

Based on the various topics brought up last week, I would like for a team of docs contributors and interested parties in the AH-O2 team to brainstorm how you want to go about handling the help documentation that can be presented to the rest of the team so the dev team knows what we need to build. @siobhan @drewapicture @kpdesign – if any of you would be willing to lead the charge on this or suggest someone else who could lead a sub-team for discussing this, that would be awesome. A number of AH-O2 team members have expressed an interest in getting involved in this side of things, as well.

Progress updates

  • @mdbitz is working on the help overviews. Because of the holidays, last week was somewhat of a bust but will have something to show on Thursday.
  • @ninnypants & @brainfork are working on the tooltips. Currently their tasks are modifying the api as it exists now to hook the tooltips to labels/titles rather than an icon and adding more tooltips to hook content to. The current plan is to pick a page, and start adding tooltips to it (with filler text at least) and then move onto the next page. Since plugins.php has already gotten the initial treatment, we’re starting there. Much of the initial placement of the tooltips will be based on the spreadsheet that @zoerooney and @ubernaut are working on.
  • @trishasalas is going to work on styling the tooltips so they look nicer.
  • @trishasalas is going to be acting as a liaison with the a11yAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) team to make sure we’re on track there. Right now, since there’s not a lot of code laid down yet, there isn’t much we can do, but there are a few things we need to be thinking about.
  • The big thing that was discussed was keyboard navigation, a scope of which can be found here: http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/NOTE-WCAG20-TECHS-20130905/G90 This was brought up in the discussion of the tooltips since tooltips are triggered by hover actions.
  • @ninnypants talked about how the tooltip api works which is a good read if anyone is looking to jump into the js side of this plugin and needs a head start or just as a refresher of how things are working. Discussion starts around here: https://irclogs.wordpress.org/chanlog.php?channel=wordpress-sfd&day=2013-12-30&sort=asc#m73182
  • @ubernaut and @zoeyrooney will continue to work on filling in the blanks in the spreadsheet to identify what help exists and what things we need and what may need to be reworded. Right now the focus is on identifying places for tooltips for @brainfork & @ninnypants to work on adding in, especially since the overview content is largely up in the air and depends on what the Docs team works out. (@ubernaut and @zoerooney should be involved in that discussion/those discussions as well.)

Development Timeline

A few dates were tossed around for possible 3.9/4.0 release. We’ll want to try to align our schedule to the 3.9 release so we’re ready when it’s time to merge the feature plugins into /trunk for 4.0 (which will happen after 3.9 is released). The two tentative dates for 3.9 are April 15/28 with tentative dates for 4.0 being August 12/19. A lead hasn’t been selected for 3.9/4.0 and ultimately the release schedule will be determined by the lead(s), but, for our part, we should anticipate being ready to deployDeploy Launching code from a local development environment to the production web server, so that it's available to visitors. by the middle of April with as many major issues ironed out as possible. Here’s a modified (and tentative) development timeline — much of this will depend on what the Docs sub-team comes back with and how much will need to be changed to accommodate their suggestions.

  • January 6 — initial help overview integration & AH-O2 to be added to wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org//plugins
  • January 13 — initial tooltips to be added for all admin pages
  • January 20 — list of wants/needs from docs sub-team (this is on the outside, ideally we need this as soon as possible)
  • February 3 — first AH-O2 betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. release
  • April 15 — tentative release date for WordPress 3.9, AH-O2 is fully tested and ready for inclusion in coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress..

#4-0, #admin-help, #ah-o2

Chris Reynolds 8:04 pm on December 18, 2013
Tags: , ah-o2   

AH-O₂ update

Hey folks —

Next Monday I’m most likely going to be on the road during our meeting time and/or may not have reliable internet access. I still encourage you all to go on without me.

I set up a Google Group for out-of-IRC discussion. I think it’s time — our group is big enough and there’s enough stuff going on with different sub-teams that I think this will make things easier to coordinate. I will be inviting everyone to the group but if I forget to invite you or you would like to be added and participate in the discussions, you can request to be invited (in the comments here or in the group):

https://groups.google.com/d/forum/ah-o2

#admin-help, #ah-o2

Chris Reynolds 3:41 pm on December 17, 2013
Tags: , ah-o2   

AH-O₂ Plugin update

Hey lurkers and AH-O2 peeps —

I made a couple minor changes to the pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party. One was merging a pull request from @ninnypants that fixed the tooltip issue (tooltip on the Help element on the Plugins page wasn’t displaying). Now that that’s fixed, we have something we can actually look at. Hovering over the Help will display the tooltip. It’s unstyled and ugly (CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. peeps, here’s your chance to contribute code), but it’s there and we can start to see what things might look like.

We talked yesterday about eliminating the icon entirely. (The reason there’s a big HELP there, by the way, is because there’s an <i> tag wrapped around the “Help” which is still contained within that <h2> which is what makes it so big.) @ninnypants said that would be pretty simple but the js would need to be tweaked a bit. (@brainfork if you want to look into that catch up with @ninnypants.)

Now for the people who’ve been watching this from the periphery —

If you grab a copy of what is in the repo right now, and go to the Plugins page, you’ll see what I’m talking about above. For the tooltips, wherever we want to put a tooltip, we need to define that space in the 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/. file. So this is why we want to go through all the admin pages, figure out what help we have and what elements on those pages might require (or benefit from) tooltips as well as what the existing help content gives us that could be adapted to tooltips. Previously, this was all sort of abstract, since there wasn’t anything you could actually see to demonstrate what we’re going after.

I think the help overview is probably easier to grasp since it is pretty similar to the overview in the existing help tabs and is also similar to the dashboard welcome screen, but when we’ve got that implemented in the plugin, I’ll post another update to illustrate what we’re going for there.

For those of you who haven’t (or don’t wanna) download the plugin, here’s a screenshot of what we got:
https://cloudup.com/cbF5RC7GaTF

#admin-help, #ah-o2

Chris Reynolds 10:00 pm on December 16, 2013
Tags: , ah-o2   

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

Chris Reynolds 7:05 pm on December 9, 2013
Tags: , ah-o2   

AH-O₂ Update (the project formerly known as Admin Help) — 9 December, 2013

The Plan

  • We’re going to shoot for WordPress 4.0.
  • I am going to implement a release schedule and base our schedule on 3.9, however, we’re going to shoot for a 6 week cycle (ideally leaving time for testing). I’ll post the schedule but it will be subject to change.
  • I am going to make an announcement/call for devs post on make/coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.

Stuff that needs to be done

This is the more immediate stuff that we need to take care of:

  • @ninnypants’ tooltips and other js stuff needs to be finalized, tested, merged into the main github repo
  • admin help overview needs to be implemented. this uses the usermeta setting to determine whether to display the help overview and js from @ninnypants’ repo to feed the content into the spaces. but the spaces need to be there for the content. @trishasalas and @nlarnold1 and @jazzs3quence would like to start looking at this
  • once the overview container is created and works, we will need content to feed into it
  • likewise with the tooltips, once the js is done, we will need content to send to those to make sure they work
  • once these things are in some kind of working order, I will upload the pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party to WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/

@ninnypants’ repo is here https://github.com/ninnypants/WordPress-Admin-Help/tree/core_js main repo is https://github.com/jazzsequence/WordPress-Admin-Help

After we push the plugin to wp.org, the plan is to do weekly updates to the plugin from the 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(s) after the meeting (assuming things have been done to the codebase).

Admin Help is now AH-O2

“Breathing new life into admin help!”

…so yeah, we have a codename.

(Tentative) Schedule

  • December 12 — target release date for 3.8
  • January 6 — target date for tasks above to be completed, and AH-O2 to be added to WordPress.org/plugins
  • February 3 — (tentative) target date for first AH-O2 betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process.
  • Sometime in the future — WordPress 3.9 is released
  • Sometime after that — WordPress 4.0 is released (hopefully with AH-O2)

(this schedule will be updated/changed as we know more about the release schedule for 3.9 in advance of 4.0)

Props to @nlarnold1 for joining us today and being willing to dive in.

#admin-help, #ah-o2