Hallway Hangout: Let’s chat about the Site Editor & 6.3

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:

@karmatosed @paaljoachim @beckej @scruffian @annezazu @piermario @james-roberts

Video Recording:

Notes:

We kicked off the hallway hangout going over various places to stay up to date on what’s happening:

• Phase 2 overview issue: tracking the high level, larger projects for 6.3.
• Phase 2 board: tracking the high level projects alongside medium projects that ladder into the larger work.
• UX and Polish board: tracking smaller, developer ready items that help polish the experience. This is a great place for folks who want to dive in to help without needing to stay up to date on the larger projects.

From there, we discussed the larger topic of reintroducing content editing to the site editor, including where hints in the interface should be, the need to have strong user stories around using this functionality, and ensuring clarity between template and post editor. We very briefly touched on how there will be expanded Detail views of page, template, template part, styles without going into much detail. 

We then jumped into evolving the wp:pattern block and how that ties in with work to add UI to save patterns and having a library to store patterns alongside reusable blocks. This included watching a video demo about syncing patterns and going through details of sync, partial sync, unsync. Later on, we discussed being able to see a hierarchy of styles and knowing which make up a pattern. 

With Ben on the call, we went over the focuses for 6.3 for navigation, including: adding back the navigation section to the Site Editor, improved link control, and using slugs to reference menus. We talked about the problem with how you can repeatedly import classic menus, leading to lots of extra menus, and discussed the need to see where menus are used when they are listed out so you know which to delete. 

We ended on some interesting technical happenings that lead to some powerful 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./UXUX UX is an acronym for User Experience - the way the user uses the UI. Think ‘what they are doing’ and less about how they do it. options:

• Simplified layout controls trying to bring together multiple tooling options into a more condensed interface. 
• Expose revisions (styles, templates, and template parts), including chatting about a current bug in the experience preventing us from testing in the outreach program. We went into some detail talking about Style revisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision. and watched a demo of what that could look like to have visual revision history.
• Add a command center option for ease of access to get where you want in WordPress.

Lots of work has momentum right now so stay tuned for much of it to be tested! 

#fse-hallway-hangout