Hallway Hangout: Discussion on Full Site Editing Issues/PRs/Designs (8 April)

This is a summary of a Hallway Hangout that was wrangled in the #fse-outreach-experiment channel as part of the FSE Outreach Program. Thank you to everyone who joined in! If you’re keen to join an effort like this in the future, please 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.

Attendance: @poena @paaljoachim @mkaz @annezazu @oglekler and Karl joined.

Video Recording:

Topics Covered

• We started off with a neat issue from Paal around adding the post/page title to the post editor‘s top bar to create a more consistent experience between the site editor and post editor for users.
• We talked about the saving flowFlow Flow is the path of screens and interactions taken to accomplish a task. It’s an experience vector. Flow is also a feeling. It’s being unselfconscious and in the zone. Flow is what happens when difficulties are removed and you are freed to pursue an activity without forming intentions. You just do it.

  Flow is the actual user experience, in many ways. If you like, you can think of flow as a really comprehensive set of user stories. When you think about user flow, you’re thinking about exactly how a user will perform the tasks allowed by your product.Flow and Context

  and how it’s a key part to build trust with users exploring a new feature for the first time. Currently, it’s a bit confusing and not yet robust enough to be fully intuitive to use.
• We discussed how consistency across saving experiences will go a long way including having similar flows for saving individual 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. changes, a reusable block, a template, and more.
• We talked through the designs shared around saving drafts of changes along with scheduling changes. This could be a neat but complex feature to manage due to the multi-entity aspect of FSE.
• We talked about how it would be neat for there to be a “builder mode” where certain tool could be more visible when you’re in the process of active building vs maintaining. This is likely a role for a 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 play in the future.
• While chatting about dismissing changes, Marcus brought up an interesting point around dismissing changes wondering aloud how often do people unselect changes? It would be neat to find comparison points.
• Paal shared a neat design he worked on where if someone unchecks/unselects changes, the save button changes to discard changes. This could be a neat way to act as a confirmation message for the user and a neat contextual nudge.
• We went through template editing and the recently merged PR allowing classic themes access to a blank template. Carolina shared that this is currently setup as being opt out for themers and that one can’t choose from an existing template yet (can only edit the current template or create a new one).
• As we were going through template editing, we paused to talk about how valuable a welcome guide will be at this stage. There is one in progress for the site editor that should cover this as it mentions if a user accesses site editing via editing a post.
• We chatted about the dynamic between editing one piece of your site vs the entire thing and how to add necessary friction to the experience. This included talking about the designs shared around clicking in to edit template parts.

Next Steps:

@annezazu reported a few bugs found and left a comment on an issue to pass along feedback from the group:

• Commented on an issue about adding post/pages to the navigation component to consider making adding pages/post more visible as it’s likely people will want to add more pages/posts than new templates or template parts.
• Opened an issue around hiding the preview button when going through the saving flow to match what’s done with the post editor.
• Opened an accessibility issue around the lack of focus on a saving prompt found by @poena.
• Opened an issue around the “apply” button appearing without making any changes after switching into template editing causing a dead end.

#fse-hallway-hangout, #fse-outreach-program, #full-site-editing