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 source project.
I’ve been informed by some colleagues that this week has been super cold in areas around the globe. I live in Southern California and haven’t experienced it, but I truly hope you all are staying warm. The GitHub repo for Gutenberg, on the other hand, is on fire (in a good way)! 😉
There’s a lot of development movement happening right now.
In addition, the integration of the widget-blocks in the wp-admin are being figured out too. Right now, it looks like staying inline with the mockups provided during the State of the Word might be the path to take (with some minor improvements of course). There’s also a desire to implement better a11y while we’re working on this as well.
This is a big one. While exploring the block itself, there’s been conversations in GitHub about how navigation is built. Is the block a simple one that just allows the user to select which menu they want to use? Or is the block where the whole menu is built? This decision effects the implementation of navigation building in Gutenberg going forward. One thing we know for sure is that everything is becoming a block in Phase 2, so these decisions are crucial right now. If you have some thoughts, please share them on GitHub.
It’s amazing to see all the areas in Gutenberg that are getting tightened up! Gutenberg 4.9 just released with a couple of beautiful design improvements: table striping and color swatch indicator. More design improvements are happening daily. Take a look at all the things.
Some might say that Documentation isn’t really design, so why’s it here? But really, documentation should be a community wide endeavor. There are weekly edits being completed to make sure the future of Gutenberg has a solid foundation. Here’s what’s been done… and what’s being worked on. These are fairly simple textual explanations of Gutenberg. If anyone is looking to contribute with something non-code related, this is a great way to begin.
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Communication consistency is key to this project. That’s why these weekly design updates are going out every Friday. Thanks for reading, staying informed, and contributing anywhere you can!
As we all know that the PHP 5.5, 5.6 and 7.0 has hit the EOL (End of Life) and is no longer actively supported, PHP 7.2 and 7.3 are now actively supported. The #core-php team is working on a page that spreads awareness about upgrading the server to supported PHP versions for the purpose of performance and security.
Work has been going on for a while, the #core-php team is working on this and they have built a page right now which can be viewed here.
There were a few designs that were created back in May 2018 and will have to be reworked on to accomodate the new fresh content. The page has a chunk at the top which gives a clear message if the server needs to be upgraded or not.
The current design is single column and does not have the ‘Table of Contents’ like the one implemented in the live page. There also needs to be a more design-wise seamless integration of the chunk at the top which gives a clear message if the server needs to be upgraded or not.
This page is currently live but needs improvement in terms of how it educates the user by clearly telling that the upgrade is required. @flixos90 and myself are working on this page. Contributions and thoughts are welcome and you can reach out to us or #design channel to discuss this.
The WordPress showcase is a portfolio of inspiring and innovative sites built with WordPress. It features some of the nicest sites in the world that are built with WordPress. It should feature all of them 🙂
There’s a post on the Make/Marketing blog that outlines the project, it contains slightly more than just features and design, so let me re-iterate those here.
We’d like to add:
The design currently looks slightly dated, especially on the single pages. The current design also doesn’t work too well on mobile and actually has a double hamburger menu, which is confusing.
Ping @joostdevalk on Slack and/or respond here. As this is quite a chunk of work, we are looking if a company is willing to sponsor a designer for this, so we can move forward at a high pace. We will then form a working group and start iterating.
Howdy! Another week, another meeting. Followup are the highlights from our Slack chat today. You can also read the whole log if you wish!
The marketing team would like to redesign the WordPress showcase and the processes around it. You can learn more about the project on the marketing blog.
Joost de Valk started the meeting by opening the conversation up to the design team for feedback on how we can approach this project. He also asked for any designers who would like to volunteer to work with the team on this. Hoping to have it completed by February 28th.
With this project we’d like to structure it similar to the Site Health Check project, with a designer supporting the marketing team and sharing regular updates back to the Slack discussion.
Joost will create a Trello card and we’ll have a followup post here with details. You can follow the whole Slack chat as well!
Tim Hengeveld shared an update: “Things are chugging along nicely. There have been some people coming into the Github issue already very excited by the project and willing to help out with the ideation”
Tim draft a user flow for the project, and would love feedback from the team here once it’s ready. Look for an updated post soon on this.
Gutenberg 4.9 just released with design improvements!
Mark Uraine shared an update. This is the perfect time to get involved in Phase 2. There are big things that are needed as well as small tasks that you can jump into.
Thanks everyone! Looking forward to an amazing 2019.
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This week’s meeting will be at 19:00 UTC tomorrow in Slack #design.
Here are the suggested topics:
If there is anything you would like to see added to the agenda, please leave a comment.
January is halfway done and Gutenberg issues are gaining traction and feedback from a variety of people. Thanks to everyone for sharing your thoughts, and opinions!
There’s been several concerns about widgets from people in the slack feeds, so thought to address it here briefly. While Gutenberg is converting all core widgets to blocks, they won’t be going away completely quite yet. 😉 There is a “Classic Widget” block being built to support the widgets that haven’t yet converted to blocks. If you’re looking to get involved, please check out the GitHub project board.
In relation to this, the widgets screen in wp-admin will be changing over to blocks. There’s concern around this for good reason. But ultimately as everything becomes a block, this paradigm shift needs to be communicated in smaller steps to help all users make the transition.
The navigation block and the interface for creating navigation menus is being discussed with some innovative concepts. What if the “Pages” screen was where you built your nav keeping the nav block simple? Or should the nav block be where you create the entire menu? Share ideas in the ticket!
If neither the widgets blocks, nor nav blocks are your thing, there’s a whole list of Gutenberg related issues that need tightening up. As mentioned in the State of the Word, “tightening up” is a focus for Phase 2. There’s a lot that needs work! Come help.
Yep, research is still ongoing. Some themes are beginning to emerge as they work through the data. Help out in the #research channel in slack.
There’s also conversation around how to present the data, and where to store it; a site, a PDF, Google Slides?
Many like to post their thoughts and explorations on their own blogs. Unfortunately this isn’t always highly visible. Well there’s a whole project board dedicated to research with a column specific to “explorations.” Give a shout out in either the #design or #research channels in slack to get your work added there. Every little bit helps inform decisions going forward.
A new week, a new meeting in the WordPress design team. Woo hoo! You can follow the posted agenda here.
First up, we chatted about the update PHP page in WordPress. Felix Artnz shared the need for design support.
He is representing the #core-php team, and has been working on helping site owners update outdated versions of PHP. Link to the Slack chat conversation.
The update PHP page is an important part of all this. They’re looking for design help on the page, updating visual assets and the copy. Jayman Pandya volunteered to help and give updates back to the channel with Felix.
Earlier today Tim Hengeveld shared a call for design to join on an exciting project. I want to use the nifty embed feature in this post, check it out!
We also briefly walked through preferred methods of communication in the Core Design team. Often the question comes up about where information should be shared. Should it be put into Trac, Trello, Github, Slack? The Make WordPress blog?
Any of these can work, but in general try to put discussions in a place available to all team members, and reference those back to the Slack channel when possible.
That’s what Slack is for, an open communication avenue for anyone to jump in and follow!
Luke Pettway and Meagen Voss have been working hard recently to build a bridge between a11y (accessibility team) and design. Tammie shared a few questions with the channel:
We discussed the need for more understanding of the needs of the a11y team. Luke Pettway volunteered to share a walkthrough (potentially as videos) of ways we can help!
Luke Pettway and Meagen Voss have also been looking at updating the handbooks for each team in WordPress to include accessibility information. They could see various accessibility plugins created for the tools the design team uses (Sketch, InVision, and maybe Figma)
It’s important to consider a11y early on since some of the biggest problems can arise during the planning stage, before anything is even designed.
We also discussed ways that we can continue to communicate and connect more closely so that we’re all working together with a single focus.
Luke Pettway also shared a link to resources, as a starting point for anyone interested in learning more.
The a11y team would love to help in anyway that’s needed!
Some of you may have heard of the Health Check plugin – It’s a very useful tool that shows people how their website is doing technically. It displays all the relevant technical information about a WordPress installation and offers tips on what to improve.
The intention is to evolve this plugin into something really awesome where (parts of) it can be merged into core. The main issue is that it needs a UX and UI overhaul. Right now the plugin mostly consists of grey pages with lots of words and numbers on them, some of which are SO long that I had to crop the screenshot by half to get it to upload:
(Click to enlarge)
There are lots of good tools there, but we need to make sure people know how to use them, and why they should. So even before making any designs, we should think about the UX of the plugin as a whole. Questions like:
The improved Site Health Check is aiming to be ready for WordPress 5.2, which is roughly estimated to come out in Q2 of 2019. That’s not loads of time, and we are a very small team at the moment (@clorith, @miss_jwo and myself), so we’re looking for any input on the above questions.
I’ve started a central issue on the plugin’s Github repo to discuss the UX, any contributions are welcome there: https://github.com/WordPress/health-check/issues/227
I’m hoping to work out new layouts and flows in the next few weeks, and then start designing the final look at the end of February at the latest. That’s around the same time 5.1 is slated to come out, and should give us enough time to implement everything.
Worth noting is that we want to try to apply the Gutenberg style to this. It would be a nice test case of what WordPress’ intended new design direction will look like outside of the editor, and it matches nicely with previous design work done around this project.
Like I said, feel free to drop by the Github issue to help us come up with a great user flow. We have an opportunity to reshape the UX of this thing, so I want to get as many eyes on it as are willing and able. Sketches, thoughts, reference material to look at, it’s all good. I’ll be dropping more sketches there in the coming days, any feedback is welcomed.
You can download the current stable version of the plugin to try on your own WordPress site from here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/health-check. Note that that doesn’t include the new actionable traffic-light-based site status section you can see in the screenshots above. Of course, if you know what you’re doing you can compile a build from the develop branch on the repo to see the latest progress.
There is also a section in the Handbook that describes how to use the Site Health Check Plugin: https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/appendix/troubleshooting-using-the-health-check/
And at the link below you can find a comprehensive post about the research @miss_jwo did that led to this point, and the broader context of this plugin in the Site Health project:
I’ll try to keep you updated on our progress roughly every week here on the design blog.
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