annezazu 7:42 pm on October 26, 2022
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Hallway Hangout: Discussion on wrapping Phase 2 (26 Oct)

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!

Attendance: Rich Tabor, Damon Cook, Courtney Roberston, Paal Joachim Romdahl, Jeff Ong, Nick Diego, Vagelis, Sé Reed, Piermario Orecchioni. 

Video Recording:

Topics:

The main topic centered around the work underway to wrap phase 2 gathered in this overview issue. Expect regular updates to this issue and know that other work will continue but there’s a big emphasis to complete the tasks outlined there. 

As of last week, the following was in place:  

  • Work has been completed (1)
  • Dev work is underway (9)
  • We’re in the design stage still (3).
  • Dev is assigned but hasn’t started (3).
  • Means work is stuck but there’s follow up to try to get unstuck (1).
  • Means work is stuck, either due to a problem or a time lapse of 14+ days, and unclear how to unblock (11).

From there, we dug into the following individual issues to chat through at a high level what we were seeing. At a high level, it stuck out to folks how many different explorations there are, conflicting designs at times, etc. By doing this work concurrently, these differences can be resolved and the solutions refined together. 

Introduce “Browser” and surface main navigation UI. 

We talked about how this was a change in the entrance to the site editor just as much as it was for navigating between content. There was a desire to be able to click on the site title in the nav component to take you to the front end of the site. We discussed the important of accessibilityAccessibility 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) testing for this change and it’s top of mind to test for the FSE Outreach Program. 

Global styles: Offer a way to view a document containing all blocks and styles

  • Overall, this would be a great way to get a sense of how changes impact the entirety of the site and in creating a more unified approach. 
  • When looking at this issue, various folks commented on how it feels like there’s a number of different modes and it isn’t always clear how they relate and don’t relate. Part of this is due to designs being in progress at various stages and including some work but not others. 
  • We chatted about how the IA needs to improve around right/left sidebars. Is there a best practice for when to put things in left vs right 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. in the design library? Are we at a critical point in that convo right now? What about RTL when it comes to moving where things “live”? 

Make it possible to push local block styles to global block styles

  • This was noted as something that’s likely for more advanced folks but still very handy.
  • There are some tricky things to figure out since the styles pushed would have to be supported within GS.
  • It also requires a site to be built in a certain way to work since there’s some complexity around the specificity of global styles. 

Using the template editor for plugins

  • We talked about plugins using the template editor (example from Woo) and how the template editor doesn’t have access to global styles, leading to viewing Consider exposing the Styles UI for classic themes using theme.json.
  • We discussed what consolidation of the various editors might look like and how the current work seeks to make everything more unified, with the option to edit content in the site editor for example. 

Media library getting the “FSE treatment”

Feedback on the Quick Inserter prioritizing patterns in certain circumstances 

  • We discussed some pain points around when the quick inserter prioritizes patterns, especially the struggle to be able to add a 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.!
  • Talked about having it be a user preference to start with blocks vs patterns. 
  • There are generally two different mindsets when working with blocks vs patterns. 
  • Could the slash inserter work with patterns? There’s already an open issue here. 

Other topics and questions

Folks shared that responsiveness is still a big topic along with navigation block. Multiple people echoed both. Damon shared in the chat: “The Navigation block has SO much complexity, but tackling the challenges will likely surface many great ideas that can be rolled out to other blocks that have complete UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing./interaction”. Finally, we chatted at the end about the history of the Query LoopLoop The Loop is PHP code used by WordPress to display posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each post to be displayed on the current page, and formats it according to how it matches specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code in the Loop will be processed on each post. https://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop. block naming (why not loop?), where folks can report issues when 6.1 is out in the wild, and what’s next for the FSE Outreach Program.

#fse-hallway-hangout