Development on WordPress 3.6 has been picking up some speed as features have been getting locked in and conversations started about what the big release should have in it.
As always, conversations will continue to expand and new features will definitely continue to evolve but here are some of the top conversations already begun:
1. Post Formats UI Feature
Post formats is going to be a major win for 3.6. It’s one of those features that has so much potential, but it really falls short in usability and honestly we haven’t really taken the time to truly show what it can do. We’re going to re-think the admin UI for post formats, similar to what Alex King did with his WordPress Post Formats Admin UI plugin. The goal is to make post formats much more user friendly and then show them off with the 2013 theme.
@Helen will be lead for this particular project and we’re stoked to see her lead us the way into sheer awesomeness.
Learn more about this conversation here and here.
2. Auto-Save and Post Locking
This is going to be a major feature that I cannot wait to see – I mean, how many times have you been writing that epic post and hit save and realize that your connection has dropped and you lose all that amazing content?
Yup (raises hand).
I want, as a major 3.6 bullet point, that we should never lose posts due to expired cookies, loss of connection, inadvertent navigation (even if AYS’d), plugin or core errors on save, browser crashes, OS crashes, cats walking on keyboards, children drooling in keyboards, etc. I want people to trust WordPress with their posts.
They should never fear that something they’ve spent time creating or editing should go away due to their mistake or ours or that of a third party. Mistakes and errors should be recoverable. I can’t stress enough how important it is that people believe this and have good reason to believe it.
If a post gets lost, there is a catastrophic loss of trust, that could take years to be regained (if indeed it ever is). This is people’s time and their creative output we’re talking about. If we’re not valuing those things above all else, then our priorities are seriously out of order.
This is an all-hands-on-deck item for 3.6. Even if you’re not actively working on the code or the copy or the UI or the UX I want you to be thinking about ways in which WordPress could better treat your creative output as the valuable artifact it is.
I love how Mark stresses the point of trust with the system – something that many people don’t necessarily think about as much as they need to with the creation of applications. It’s true though – we implicitly trust WordPress more than we’d like to admit with the stuff that we do daily. It’s huge!
3. Editorial Flow
As an editor of this news blog I’m keen on finding solutions that make my job easier and more easy for all those that are contributing their time and efforts to creating amazing content, which is why this particular feature and interest is really important to me, personally.
I’m really excited to see our editorial flow get some love in the 3.6 cycle! We always want to be as extensible as possible and post statuses are one of those places where we’re not near as good as we should be.
Aaron D. Campbell is helping to lead this charge and I’m super pumped.
Daniel Bachhuber is actually leading here. Thanks for the correction Aaron!
4. Revisions
I’ve had somewhat of a love-hate relationship with revisions ever since they were first introduced – either they “worked” for me (sometimes randomly) or I wouldn’t use them at all.
@Westi and the team hopes to make it even better and I’m going to stay close to the ground to see how it all pans out:
Revisions are an extremely powerful tool for content tracking, but there are a few parts that need a little TLC. Ever since they were first introduced, there’s been a problem with proper author attribution on revisions (see#16215), and we’re going to take a crack at fixing that in 3.6.
Additionally, while the current diffs are pretty cool, and make a lot of sense to those of us that look at diffs everyday, there’s a lot of room for improvement for your average user. We’d like to see some UI improvements around the diffs as well as information that makes more sense to an average content creator (words changed, a visual representation of what was added/removed, prettier output, etc).
I’d love to see this become an incredible part of my workflow that makes sense. So far I use different applications for diff that make much more sense for my overall workflow – most of this is because I draft a lot outside of WordPress itself.
5. Menus
Menus, menus, menus! We’ve got so many already!
@Lessbloat will be leading this charge and this particular feature will surely help the adoption of WordPress even more as newbies engage with the system for the first time.
For menus we’re going to try to focus on some UI improvements. Menus work pretty well but users, especially the less-technical ones, are easily confused. We’ve seen them try to add menus without names because they see the “Create Menu” button before they see the menu name field, we’ve seen them add a bunch of menus instead of menu items because they’re unclear on the difference, etc, etc. The goal for the 3.6 cycle is to make menus a little more intuitive and user friendly.
It’s fascinating to see first-time users engage with WordPress – it can be scary and even confusing for many of them. I have to constantly remind myself that I’m not that first-time user and that there are ways to make it even more intuitive.
6 Comments