MP6 - Top Secret Plugin

MP6 – Top Secret Plugin???

Published

February 27, 2013

13 Comments

We found a secret plugin in today’s roundup and I wanted to spend a litte more time digging into it. The name of the plugin is MP6 and the author is Matt Mullenweg.

It seems to be a plugin that is dedicated to UI changes for WordPress 3.6.

Simplifying the wp-admin UI is a challenging task, as flattening the icons showed us when you improve one thing it just makes all of the other out of date elements stand out more.

Trunk isn’t terribly well-suited for UI iteration, so this plugin is a chance for us to rapidly iterate in a way people can use and test some new ideas for how to visually tie together the aesthetics of our current wp-admin UI.

User Interface Changes

It seems that there are a few noticeable changes with the UI when you activate the plugin. The icons have been changed to more of a flat design.

They are looking for specific feedback about the icons and you can join in here if you like. The other thing that I noticed that has been changed is the meta box header background colors. They too seem to be flat without a gradient background.

It seems that they will be using this plugin as the avenue to iterate through the UI design. If you want to keep up with the changes, then I suggest you install and activate MP6. I’m sure with each plugin update will come some UI changes.

Screenshots

Plugin Name Meaning

The plugin supposedly doesn’t stand for anything. I think it would be fun to make up some ways the plugin got its name. Tom thinks if you just flip the W around you get M in MP. I’m guessing the 6 comes from the next version 3.6.

What story or meaning can you come up with?

There are 13 comments

February 27, 2013 #

Mark McWilliams

If you want my opinion, this is probably related to the latest WordPress developer chat in IRC that happened today. Going by a couple of things, it would appear (Note: I’m not 100% certain!) that there will now be no icon changes, etc, in WordPress 3.6!?
- February 27, 2013 #
  
  Jason Bradley
  
  Wow, thanks for more deets on this. I only had a few hours to play around with it so far, but the new design was kind of growing on me. It would be really cool if they were able to use genericons web font.
  - February 27, 2013 #
    
    Mark McWilliams
    
    I also quite liked the flat icon lool. I pretty much run the latest version of WordPress on my site, thanks to a few plugins (save me pushing any buttons), and got quite used to the change. The icons have now also been reverted back to what we had.
    
    Thanks for pointing out that very secret plugin though, it’s been downloaded and activated. I look forward to seeing what they do with this stuff. Kind of reminds me what John O’Nolan tried with his UI Labs plugin, back when he was more involved with the UI stuff.
    - February 27, 2013 #
      
      Jason Bradley
      
      I’m sure we will see their return at some point. It’s an interesting idea around being able to be iterative with the design or something else, using plugins.
February 27, 2013 #

David McDougal

Multiple Personalities #6

Many Possibilities #6

Make Pretty v6

I could go on all day….

I kind of like the flat icon UI look, but it can get too cartoony too fast.
- February 27, 2013 #
  
  Jason Bradley
  
  Agreed. It has to be done tastefully. I’m a big fan of the flat design with the Letterpress game on iPhone. If they took design queues from that, then I think they would be in business!
February 27, 2013 #

MaAnna

I wish to heck they would be more considerate of the folks who make tutorials. I have to update a lot of videos and written tutorials when they make design changes like this. Even though the core content is the same, the screenshots look dated. And beginners get confused if things don’t appear the same. Seems like an awesome waste of time for everyone, IMHO.
- February 27, 2013 #
  
  Chris Rouse
  
  As someone who wrote the user guide for my company’s main products, I totally understand this. We made some changes that I reflected in our user guide, but they are outdated in the tutorial videos that we had produced for us. We can’t just change out a 5 second clip in the video as easily as I can make a two sentence change or update a screenshot.
- February 28, 2013 #
  
  Jason Bradley
  
  I’m sure it could be difficult to keep tutorials up to date, but is that a business reason to slow down UI improvements? I know there are tools out there like Axure that help with doing things like documenting designs that are prone to going through UI iterations. I’m sure there are plenty of folks who enjoy the new Media uploader in 3.5, and it’s a completely new design 🙂
February 28, 2013 #

Paul

Do all the UI changes benefit the end user? Or just the designers egos? Wouldn’t time be better spent on fixing long standing bugs, an there a a few trac tickets that I’d really like to see committed instead of focusing on whether a flat icon is better than a 3d colored one…

Sorry for the rant
- February 28, 2013 #
  
  Jason Bradley
  
  I sure hope that UI changes are created because of user feedback and research. There’s also the side of constantly keeping an application design up to date with it’s design and common components from other things like apps on your phone 🙂
February 28, 2013 #

Jared

I like the idea of flat icons but wasn’t a fan of the implementation at all. Glad they aren’t going to rush it.
- February 28, 2013 #
  
  Jason Bradley
  
  I too am a fan of flat design patterns when done well. I do agree that the first iteration of icons wasn’t the best, but I did like them better than the others.

User Interface Changes

Screenshots

Plugin Name Meaning

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