The Design Team provides user experience, user interface, and visual design expertise for the WordPress project.
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Welcome! This all-volunteer team needs designers of various kinds. See our handbook and drop into #design once signed up for volunteer opportunities.
Our vision is to be the go-to resource for design for other teams across the WordPress open sourceOpen SourceOpen Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. project.
Today we closed the call for new team nominations and we only had one entry.
I would like to welcome @shaunandrews as the new design team repTeam RepA Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts.. Shaun is a designer who has focused on the new editor and has been collaborating with the design team for a few years now.
He has new ideas as to how the team will work better and be more succesfull in the future. Check the blog for ideas and new workflows that we will bring to the team.
We are at a point in the GutenbergGutenbergThe Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ development where we have many new features to help people visually create, edit, and manage their site. These include, but are not limited to:
Pages & posts: Add and edit with blocks and patterns.
Template editing: the ability to customise theme templates, and create new templates ad hoc.
Styles: change the color, fonts, and layout across your site.
Template parts: Create and edit headers, footers, and other areas.
More features continue to be added and @jameskoster and I have been iterating on how we can surface these new features in a way that is both intuitive for new users and familiar to existing users. To keep the scope focused, we looked at the features in coreCoreCore is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. today along with the ones that are being worked on to be considered for the 5.9 version of WP, according to this post while keeping the near future in mind as well.
To set some context
If you are already using the Gutenberg pluginPluginA 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, you may be familiar with the Site Editor menu item. This is where most of these new features can be found during development. While this works for the purpose of development, “Site Editing” is a broad expression that essentially spans the entirety of site management activities in WordPress. Do we want to begin down this path towards a single page app-like experience, or would it be better to keep things separate for now? It’s time to explore and design the IA (information architecture) so that we can begin to paint a picture of how we might merge this exciting functionality in to core.
Click on Appearance and you see Editor (beta) menu item. This keeps the concept of updating your look and feel of your site within the Appearance menu item, where current users are used to going to Customize. It is also intuitive for new users and matches the iterative approach product development has taken.
From there, you are brought to the homepage of your site, where you can immediately start to edit it – whether its a static page or your latest posts. Example of the latter:
From here, if you click on the W menu in the upper left corner, it opens a menu where you would be able to access Styles and Templates. And if you have any – other template parts. This navigation menuNavigation MenuA theme feature introduced with Version 3.0. WordPress includes an easy to use mechanism for giving various control options to get users to click from one place to another on a site. feels light right now but as more functionality gets added, this navigation could scale and grow along side it. For example, you can imagine that you’d have direct access to editing your posts and pages within here as well.
Click on Styles to update the colors, typography, and layout of your site. This also shows what a welcome guide could look like, which could be useful for big new features.
If you open the W menu again and click on Templates, you’ll view a list of all the templates you can now edit visually:
An alternative concept would be to keep template and content editing separate for now, but still bring some of the most compelling template editing functionality (like direct manipulation of headers and footers) to the post editor.
With this approach you’d edit posts and pages the way you always have, but when you open the editor there would a new option to view the full layout:
With the layout visible it becomes possible to customize the site headerHeaderThe header of your site is typically the first thing people will experience. The masthead or header art located across the top of your page is part of the look and feel of your website. It can influence a visitor’s opinion about your content and you/ your organization’s brand. It may also look different on different screen sizes., footer, and any other blocks that make up the underlying template. You would also be able to invoke the Styles panel to further refine the look and feel of your site.
Theme editing has always lived in the Appearance section of the navigation, so in this concept that is where you’d go to customise and create new templates.
Template editing can be a complex exercise, so to help narrow the scope this concept keeps content and template editing separate. So instead of being populated by actual content, blocks like Post Title and Post Content display simple placeholders to help you identify them.
Editing the theme’s Page template
In the future it would be interesting to explore options that enable users to load compatible content in to the template while editing to help with testing, but it’s not essential at this stage.
One trade-off with this approach is that in order to allow users to visually edit their home page when it is set to display latest posts, we’d need to introduce a placeholder “page” in the pages list:
This somewhat breaks the idea of keeping content and template editing separate, since visiting the latest posts “page” (and the “Posts page” for that matter) on the frontend will resolve to display the home or indextemplate. Whether this trade-off is worth making may require further technical investigation and perhaps a round of usability testing, but it’s worth noting that a similar placeholder is already utilised when you create a “Posts page” in partnership with a static home page.
Curious to hear your thoughts on these ideas and alternative proposals!
FSE Outreach Program coordinator Anne McCarthy facilitated a recent call for responses (a slight change in format from the recurring FSE calls for testing) on the topic of blockBlockBlock 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. theme switching, which officially kicked off the process of “thinking long term about what folks would want to be able to have across themes.” According to Anne’s follow up summary:
When it came to ideas for how to best manage the switching process, it quickly became clear that there’s a balance to strike between not adding too much friction to the process while also offering users options to pick and choose what can come with them when they switch.
The call for replies resulted in some imaginative descriptions of how this all could work. The responses also raise some important questions: what role should themes play in the world of block themes, especially when users may want to mix & match styles and layouts from different themes? What does switching themes mean in this context, when you might be able to use aspects from several different themes?
I used some of the responses to Anne’s post as a starting point for a blue-sky exploration around what theme switching might look like in a world of highly flexible themes that — in the true spirit of WordPress — can be hacked and cobbled together to your heart’s content.
Approach
The flows shown below stem from on an ongoing series of posts by Javier Arce and I that explore the possibility of introducing a GutenbergGutenbergThe Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/-style mosaic interface across WordPress screens — including, for example, on the Appearance/Themes page. This is a thought experiment that we are excited to share more widely — please feel free to leave comments on the blog posts or message us directly in the Making WordPress Slack!
Idea 1
Redesign the current Live Preview theme switching flow to incorporate a process similar to multi-entity saving
Entry point: Appearance/Themes
First, I explored the most literal translation of the current theme switching flow as it exists today while incorporating the top bar and other familiar Gutenberg components.
Just like the Live Preview functionality works now, we could utilize a CustomizerCustomizerTool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings.-like preview that would allow users to preview and navigate the site before activating the changes. Selections regarding which styles and layouts to activate could be made in a sidebarSidebarA 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. panel, similar to the one used for multi-entity saving.
Like the current flow, the default behavior is a one-click activation that would switch styles and layouts to the new theme’s defaults (or to the user’s prior customizations of that theme’s templates, where applicable). This is based on the assumption that the majority of users will want to switch everything to the new theme’s look — but the activation panel also provides an opportunity to offer more granular selections.
We could utilize the thumbnail preview that appears within the Global Styles panel, and there could be a toggle allowing you to switch between the theme being previewed and the active theme on your site.
From there, it would be possible to drill down into more nuanced selections. For example, you might want to keep certain aspects of your active styles (e.g., just the color or typography) and have those be activated rather than the new theme’s defaults. Similar selections could be made for the layout by picking and choosing which Templates and Template parts to keep active on your site when switching.
A fun variation on this idea is to utilize a slider for comparing the before and after layouts (similar to an Image Compare block):
Idea 2
Make Theme management accessible directly from the Site Editor
Entry point: Global Styles panel
This approach utilizes a “design dashboard” focused on theme management. This idea was originally explored as part of an Appearance menu overview screen.
What if block theme switching could be integrated directly within the site editing flow? For example, a modal containing the Appearance/Themes page could be directly accessible from the Global Styles sidebar. This would allow theme switching to happen more seamlessly without ever leaving the site editor, and hopefully turn the sometimes stressful moment of theme switching into something more akin to changing settings — it’s a low effort modal to close, reopen, and keep tinkering with.
Idea 3
Reconceptualize themes to emphasize styles (with optional or de-emphasized Templates)
Entry point: Global Styles panel
The last idea takes inspiration from a super interesting alternate range of color schemes shipping with the upcoming Twenty Twenty-Two theme. What if changing themes was about swapping styles, withtemplate changes becoming something more seamlessly intertwined with existing editing flows? For example, maybe you could browse Template parts from other themes via the inserter or an in-canvas selector.
In this case, navigation between theme styles could happen directly from within the Global Styles panel. Utilizing the current Global Styles navigation pattern, perhaps you could drill down further to adjust and fine-tune after selecting a theme style.
What’s next?
While there’s a lot left unexplored in these flows, I hope these sketches can help serve as a starting point for design discussions around things we would like to see in the future of block theme switching! A great next step would be to start narrowing in on an iterative pathway towards enabling the mixing-and-matching of block themes — at the moment of the theme switch and potentially beyond.
We had our team meeting a few days ago (Oct 6) in #design on Slack. One of the topics was around the scheduling of our meetings. Currently, we do a weekly meeting with the last meeting of the month being on Zoom.
One of the agenda items for our meeting was to discuss moving to a bi-weekly schedule. Since everyone in attendance seemed to be in favor of the change we’ll be starting this new schedule immediately. Next week (Oct 13) there will be no formal meeting. Our next meeting (Oct 20) will take place at the normal time (18:00 UTC) and will be on Zoom.
While there will be less formal, synchronous time, I encourage everyone to continue to share progress, suggest issues, and ask for help in #design on SlackSlackSlack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. at any time.
In addition to informal Slack chatter, there’s also some ongoing “Hallway Hangout” sessions happening throughout each week. These casual hangout sessions usually take place on Zoom and topics vary. Sometimes they are planned ahead, and other times they’re spur of the moment sessions announced in Slack.
Come join us in Slack and I hope to see you at a future meeting.
Our monthly “Show & Tell” Zoom call took place yesterday. This video chat is a place for designers to share their in-progress work and an opportunity for anyone to give feedback.
This months chat covered the following:
@karmatosed is planning to look into blockBlockBlock 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. support and will likely have a #hallway-hangout soon.
@javiarce shared his designs for background images.
@critterverse shared her designs for theme switching.
Next week we’ll have our regular, text-based SlackSlackSlack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. meeting.
As this is the last meeting of the month, we will be gathering on Zoom for our “Show & Tell.”
The agenda is open and we encourage anyone to share their design work with the team. If you have design work you’d like to share, or a topic you’d like to discuss together, please leave a comment below or in the #design channel of the WordPress Slack.
Close of team repTeam RepA Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts. nominations
With 5.9 on the horizon, how do we improve PRs and ticket review?
How to improve design meeting participation
Since we accomplish more while when we talk, this meeting will be a Zoom call. Please schedule accordingly. A summary and video recording will be posted for those who cannot attend.
Zoom link will be posted on the Slack channel at the meeting time.
If you have a topic, please add it to the comments and bring it during open floor in the meeting.
If you’ve ever used WordPress to create a blog post, web page, or any other type of document, then you are likely familiar with the Inspector SidebarSidebarA 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.. The sidebar shows you information and controls related to the either the selected blockBlockBlock 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., or the document itself.
The sidebar hasn’t changed very much over the years, and in many ways still resembles the pre-GutenbergGutenbergThe Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ (Classic) WordPress editor. Here’s a side-by-side of the sidebar in the classic and block editors:
Over on GithubGitHubGitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can 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/, there’s an overview of design updates to the sidebar. The designs focus on block controls, specifically typography, color, and dimensions. The issue does propose a component system of controls for things like inputs, dropdowns, and sliders, but doesn’t explore how this system could apply to the document controls shown above.
Since we’re talking about sidebar controls, I think it’s helpful to also include the design of the so-called “Global Styles” project outlined on Github. This design uses a multi-level, nested interface to group controls into Color, Typography, and Layout sections.
With all this in mind, I’ve been looking at the document sidebar and how it could be improved. For this first pass, I’m focused on the “Status & visibility” and “Permalink” sections. Here’s a look at the current design alongside my proposed changes:
There’s quite a few changes. The first, and maybe most obvious is the lack of an accordion interface containing all the controls. Instead, controls are shown and hidden using the ellipses menu; Open the menu and you can choose what controls are hidden or shown. This reduces the overall footprint of the controls, but also allows people to customize the sidebar to their specific needs.
This menu is also a convenient place to find features and functions like viewing the document’s history, renaming the document, reverting publish documents to draft, and moving the document to trashTrashTrash in WordPress is like the Recycle Bin on your PC or Trash in your Macintosh computer. Users with the proper permission level (administrators and editors) have the ability to delete a post, page, and/or comments. When you delete the item, it is moved to the trash folder where it will remain for 30 days..
At the top of the section is the current document’s title. Here’s how that could look with a few different titles.
The title itself could also be interactive, and allow for renaming the document directly from the sidebar. This is helpful as the editor’s canvas may not always include the document title. You could initiate renaming from the ellipses menu, or double-click on the title itself.
Each control within the list would be clickable, opening a popover with more information and controls to change the value.
Here’s how each control’s popover would look:
There’s a lot more to do with the remainder of the document controls, like improving categories, tags, and the featured imageFeatured imageA featured image is the main image used on your blog archive page and is pulled when the post or page is shared on social media. The image can be used to display in widget areas on your site or in a summary list of posts. controls. But for now, I think this is a good start and can hopefully lead towards improvements across the rest of the document sidebar.
Call for team repTeam RepA Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts. nominations
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