AH-O₂ Update — 3 March, 2014

Help Overview refactoring
@brainfork has been ill and was unable to work on this this week. @jazzs3quence created tickets for some of the issues that were reported in https://github.com/jazzsequence/WordPress-Admin-Help/issues/50 many of which were things that @brainfork was planning to work on. See:
https://github.com/jazzsequence/WordPress-Admin-Help/issues/55
https://github.com/jazzsequence/WordPress-Admin-Help/issues/57
https://github.com/jazzsequence/WordPress-Admin-Help/issues/47
https://github.com/jazzsequence/WordPress-Admin-Help/issues/46

Tooltips
@clorith is going to work on refactoring the tooltip structure a bit to make it more flexible for devs and give us more options for tooltip styles.
@trishasalas will be working on some new styles for the tooltips
Between the two of them, we’re hoping to nail:
https://github.com/jazzsequence/WordPress-Admin-Help/issues/58
https://github.com/jazzsequence/WordPress-Admin-Help/issues/56
https://github.com/jazzsequence/WordPress-Admin-Help/issues/45

Admin Help Inventory spreadsheet
@ubernaut has added tooltip locations to the Pages admin pages in the spreadsheet we’re using to keep track of such things. He will work on adding the actual TinyMCE formatting buttons this week.

Target Date
We’ve set a tentative target date for April 1. This will give us time to test 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 and fix any issues before the discussion begins about WordPress 4.0 feature plugins.

Help wanted!
To meet this target, we need help:

  • adding tooltips — though this process may be changing, the changes should make things easier and we can help with the transition — mostly we need new tooltips to be added (or at least written) for all the elements (that have not been added already) in the spreadsheet (or for anything else that’s missing that isn’t included)
  • testers — we’d love to have more testers look at this and let us know if/when they find any issues

If either of these things sound like ways in which you could contribute, you can let us know in the Google Group, in the comments of this post, or in our Monday meeting.

Our next meeting is next Monday 18:30UTC.

#ah-o2

AH-O₂ Update — 24 February, 2014

Cross-posted from make/docs

Help Overview refactoring
@brainfork was going to work on this but didn’t have the time. He was able to review the code though, but no progress has been made. @trishasalas has stepped up to help out with this. They will be taking a look at the issues reported in this ticket (moving help footer over) as well as this ticket (text next to dashicons are not aligned vertically) and creating new tickets for any other issues that come up.

Tooltip hover delay
@clorith reported that the tooltips were sometimes taking the focus away from the actual item. he then submitted a pull request which has been merged that increases the hover delay. This will be included in the next version in the 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/ repository.

Tooltip arrow positioning
…is still an issue for some tooltips which is mostly to do with not having good selectors to work with (not everything in the WordPress admin has IDs or classes associated with them). @trishasalas is going to look at this, but since this could be done completely differently in coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. by just adding more specific ids to the things that need tooltips, I’ve given it a lower priority. @trishasalas may try to do at least one admin page, though, as a proof-of-concept.

Versioning
Because I can’t consider this 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 “done” (and therefore 1.0) until tooltips are on every page, and because we’re going to run out of digits if we keep going at the 0.x rate for every weekly update, and because looking at a plugin in the repo that has a 0.x version looks less like a completed entity than a 1.x release, we’ve agreed to tweak how the versioning is handled a bit to make better use of minor point releaseMinor Release A set of releases or versions having the same minor version number may be collectively referred to as .x , for example version 5.2.x to refer to versions 5.2, 5.2.1, 5.2.3, and all other versions in the 5.2 (five dot two) branch of that software. Minor Releases often make improvements to existing features and functionality. versions. Updates with minor fixes or new tooltips will be considered a 0.0.x release, more significant changes will be a 0.x release. There was some discussion about this that can be read in the logs, but the main reasoning is that it seems misleading to call something a 1.0 if it’s still incomplete (in this case, missing tooltips) and we’d be at a 1.0 in 4 weeks at our current rate.

Admin Help Inventory spreadsheet
@ubernaut will work on tackling the Pages…pages next in the spreadsheet having just finished filling out the Network Admin screens.

@nikv has started work on adding tooltips to the comments page but that has not been merged into the plugin yet.

Tooltips on Mobile
We’ve decided to go with the tap-and-hold interaction for tooltips on mobile devices. This takes a lower priority to getting the tooltips in and no work has been done on it yet, but if someone would like to tackle it, let us know by commenting in the open ticket here: https://github.com/jazzsequence/WordPress-Admin-Help/issues/32

The logging bot was having a fit, so here’s my copy of the logs from the meeting (the first 15 minutes are cut off, unfortunately): http://s3q.us/log/ah-o2-log-2014-02-24.html

#ah-o2

AH-O₂ Update — 17 February, 2014

We’ll be releasing 0.7 this week. New in this update are initial tooltips for the 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. menu items & tooltips on the Users pages.

@brainfork Will be working on reworking the help overviews. This partially came out of this ticket, where it was determined that a restructure of how the overviews are marked up may be necessary.

@ubernaut will continue to work on the spreadsheet with a focus on identifying areas for new tooltips. This makes it easier when adding the tooltips in 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 know where best to place them. The next area for focus for the spreadsheet will be the Network Admin screens. I recently opened the document up to anyone with a link to make it easier for people to jump in, flesh out areas that are bare, or claim admin pages to add tooltips to without requiring an owner to invite them to be able to edit the spreadsheet.

@nikv has volunteered to help out with adding tooltips also.

I’ve updated the tooltip documentation somewhat to add some additional details/guidance for adding new tooltips. Feedback (or edits) are welcome.
https://github.com/jazzsequence/WordPress-Admin-Help/wiki/Help-Tooltips

One thing that wasn’t discussed this week (although there’s a ticket) is the fact that the arrow location for some tooltips is pointing to the wrong place. My suspicion is that this is largely a CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. issue (or an issue that can be solved with CSS) and anyone who wants to jump in and take a stab at that is welcome. There are a variety of places where this is the case and may need to be styled individually. The main issue is a lack of specific IDs/classes to hook the tooltips onto, which could be conceivably solved in coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. by adding specific classes/ids to those elements.

Our next meeting will be next Monday 18:30UTC

I’d love to hear what kinds of thoughts/suggestions you guys have to the overall 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. of the plugin/feature. At this point, things are pretty set and we’re mostly working on adding more content but I’m eager to know if there are things that we could be doing different/better.

#ah-o2

AH-O₂ Update — 10 February 2014

(cross-posted from docs, sorry for any duplicates)

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) and title attributes

It was discussed last week at the meeting — and subsequently added 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 — that we would take the title attributes of linked elements that had them by default, so that in the future, adding tooltips to these things could be handled the same way they already were. However, since @grahamarmfield’s extensive review indicated that this may be a problem for screen readers, as well as the fact that core will be removing them, this behavior has been removed and will no longer be present in the next (or future) iteration.

Tooltip pointer positioning

There are some tooltips that have somewhat “iffy” pointer positions. There are various reasons for this, but the biggest one is specificity. If we were editing core, we could add our own classes or IDs and then target things specifically, then add a tooltip to those handles. Since we aren’t, and there are some elements that don’t have their own specific wrappers (for example, some column headings), we just do the best we can. (See https://github.com/jazzsequence/WordPress-Admin-Help/issues/45 for some examples). We may come back to these later and add CSS to the pointers so they can be moved specifically for those tooltips. Moving forward, if there’s a commit adding a tooltip where this is the case, we’ll be tagging this ticket so we can keep a general record of the tooltips that are having this issue.

What we’re working on

We are primarily focusing on the task of adding tooltips to the plugin at this point.

@brainfork will also be looking into adding tooltips to the 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. menu items using a global tooltip doc and js file.

@zoerooney and @ubernaut will be working on updating the admin pages spreadsheet with a particular focus on identifying areas for tooltips. I’ve made this editable to anyone with a link to give more people an opportunity to contribute to this document (which hopefully won’t be a problem).

Testers and contributors are welcome — report any issues here: https://github.com/jazzsequence/WordPress-Admin-Help/issues?state=open

Pull requests are also appreciated!

As a reminder, our next meeting will be next Monday 18:30UTC.

#ah-o2

AH-O₂ Update — 3 February 2014

(cross-posted from docs, sorry for any duplicates)

@jazzs3quence added a few tooltips to the Users pages. Adding new tooltips is pretty easy, but we may want to revisit our documentation to clarify some things
@brainfork closed out a few tickets, including positioning the tooltips so they aren’t bouncing around and setting the anchor tag title attributes to be the tooltip content where applicable (as opposed to our own custom tooltip content).

We still need testers and documentors as well as volunteers to help add tooltips. All of these tasks are pretty simple and should only require a few minutes of instruction. 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 in the wp.org repo should get updated tomorrow with this week’s commits.

It should be noted to any make/ui-ers who haven’t looked at it yet, that we’ve removed both tabs (help/screen options) in favor of icons and text. Right now, clicking screen options just mimics the current behavior, just in the help overview area.

@jazzs3quence also created a page on github that’s a bit more friendly to non-techy peeps who want to just get the information and/or download the latest version (before it makes it to .org). That page is here: http://jazzsequence.github.io/WordPress-Admin-Help/

#ah-o2

AH-O₂ Update — 27 January, 2014

The new time threw me and I ended up starting the meeting a half hour early. Apologies to anyone who may have arrived *on time* who ended up missing the first half hour of the meeting.

This week there were some significant contributions from @mdbitz for the help overviews, @trishasalas for the tooltip styling and @brainfork and @mdbitz for new tooltips. We also have some documentation now for adding new tooltips. Most things are now functionally in place and we’re just trying to fill in the gaps.

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 contributors

I didn’t realize this was possible until @trishasalas pointed it out, but I added some folks on as contributors to the project repo on GitHub. This essentially gives them commit/merge access but it also means I can assign tickets directly to specific people/contributors. If you are interested in jumping in and would like to be added as a contributor, let me know, but I think I got everyone who’s been submitting pull requests thus far. (Pull request can still be submitted normally, the only real difference is I’m not the only one able to merge them in and/or able to push commits to the repo.)

Tooltips on mobile?

I’ve opened a ticket to discuss how to (and whether we should) handle tooltips on mobile devices. My feeling is that the value of the tooltips is discovering them accidentally when you are trying to do something and mousing around the screen. User interaction on touch devices doesn’t work the same, and any kind of interaction that would generate a tooltip that I can think of would involve more intentional interaction with the interface, which defeats the purpose to me. I’m open to other ideas, though, if anyone has them. https://github.com/jazzsequence/WordPress-Admin-Help/issues/32

New tooltips

The plugins pages should have tooltips on them now (including the subpages), so we’re going to start working through the list of admin pages to add tooltips to. Now that we have documentation on how to add them, I would like everybody on the team (and anyone else interested) to try taking an admin page and start adding tooltips. We’ll use the spreadsheet to mark what’s been done and what needs to be done as well as allow people to claim pages so we aren’t stepping on each others’ toes. This will also draw more attention to the documentation we have, and whether it needs to be updated (and to what extent it should be updated). The more people we have working on these, the faster we’ll be done, and this is the biggest chunk of work in front of us right now.

On that note, we’re going to be looking into adding tooltips to the admin 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.. One thing I was thinking about from testing was how a lot of people would move their mouse around the screen looking for things to pop out at them to guide them to their task. A tooltip that appeared over “Appearance”, for example, could explain that that’s where you go to change the look and feel of your site which might otherwise be (and was) ambiguous to some users.

Known Issues

There are a number of issues we’re currently working on fixes for, but there’s probably a lot more we aren’t aware of. If you are testing 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 and are having some issue that hasn’t been reported already, please create a ticket for us on Github so we can look at it. Make sure you check the closed tickets as well as there may be some tickets that got closed for one reason or another.

I’ve created a number of tags to filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. different types of tickets. This list is growing, but hopefully can give a casual observer a frame of reference in terms of what we might need help on and in what context:

needs testing means we need another pair of eyes on it to confirm that it is a) is happening for more than just the person reporting the issue and b) under what circumstances the issue can be reproduced. This status may also be used later for issues that have been fixed but need confirmation that the fix is working. These tickets are things where anyone is welcome to jump in and try to reproduce the issue and report back with their experience. The more information we have on these, the better.

question means the issue is open to the floor for feedback regarding how something can/should be handled. these may or may not be technical. anyone is welcome to put in their 2 cents.

priority-* refers to the priority of the ticket

wontfix means that, for whatever reason, this isn’t something that can be fixed. One example of a wontfix ticket is the $WP_Screen errors that appear with WP_DEBUG turned on. This was the only way we could pull in the existing help content without hacking coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. (and therefore is a non-issue if/when this gets merged into core). (If anyone has a better way to handle this, feel free to let us know.)

enhancements are tickets that will add some new functionality. unless assigned to someone, these are open to anyone who wants to jump in and comment or take ownership of that particular proposed functionality.

One issue that seems to resurfaced is that the add new tooltip on the plugins page is empty. I saw this early on but it seemed to fix itself and other people weren’t been able to reproduce it. It’s come back again for another tester, so we really need more testers to confirm to help us isolate this and try to figure out what’s up. Any assistance peeps can give is greatly appreciated.

#ah-o2

AH-O₂ Update, the first

Hey 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. team!

@samuelsidler thought it would be good for me to post over here for the AH-O2 project. All the previous AH-O2 posts are over on make/docs, and I don’t want to try to recreate the entire history here, but I’ll try to either cross-post or post what would be relevant from a UI perspective over here.

What is AH-O2?

AH-O2 is the project to refactor/reinvent/revitalize admin help. The main plugin repository is here: https://github.com/jazzsequence/WordPress-Admin-Help and is updated weekly on WordPress.org here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/ah-o2/.

What it does

The AH-O2 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 does 2 things:

1. It transforms the help tab into a help overview that appears at the top of the page.
2. It enables tooltips that appear when hovering over actionable elements on the page (buttons, links, headings, etc)

Both things are controlled by 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. settings from the user profile page.

Where we’re at

The help overviews have been mostly implemented, however whether the content stays the way it is now (pulling from the existing help content) or changes dramatically to fill the new space depends on whether we can get people to help write and shape the docs. @mdbitz has been responsible for most of that work and is currently working on making the overviews more responsive. Currently the help overviews will pull from the existing help content by default but can be overridden by the plugin (documentation here: https://github.com/jazzsequence/WordPress-Admin-Help/wiki/Help-Overview)

The overviews and help/screen options links have been based on some of @melchoyce‘s mockups, but we haven’t made any significant changes to what the screen options stuff does. (@melchoyce if/when you want to start looking at that again, let me know — I’d love to help)

We’ve built an APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. for adding tooltip handles and tooltip content. Currently only a few specific areas have had the tooltips enabled (Add New button on the Plugins page, All/Published/Drafts links on the Posts page) and we haven’t done any real styling to those yet.

What we’re trying to accomplish

We did user testing early on in the cycle just to try to identify if, in fact, there was an issue. We asked users, specifically people who have not used WordPress, to complete a series of normal WordPress-y tasks like writing a blog post, changing the theme, adding 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. widgets, etc, to identify what happens when they run into problems — where they look for help. Uniformly, none of them found the help tab whether they had issues or not. We tried, briefly, changing the color of the help tab and moving the help to the admin bar and tested that. The admin bar help went completely ignored and, while no one clicked on the colored help tab, a few users at least seemed to indicate that they knew it was there if they needed it.

Our approach, therefore, has been to put help in front of people so it’s not hidden. Ideally, by default, on new installations, both tooltips and help overviews will be enabled by default. For existing installations, tooltips will be enabled but overviews will be deactivated.

When we meet

We’ve been meeting on Mondays at 17:30UTC, but we are looking to change our meeting time starting next week to next Monday 18:30UTC in #wordpress-sfd. Anyone/everyone is welcome to come and contribute!

#ah-o2