As of the writing of this article WordPress Plugins are allowed to do a few things that interrupt the WordPress UI.

• Headers – In the back end, when on any page, especially settings pages of Plugins, the headers are cluttered and inconsistent. Exhibit A, B, C. To improve this we proposes approving the following:
  • Enhanced Permalink Bar – We built this.
  • Enhanced Publish Panel – We built this.
  • Add a View button to the Publish panel. Currently it only has Preview and that only shows the unpublished version. We find that users consistently do not know where to click (the permalink bar).
  • Eliminate the “Add New” Button Beside Titles in Various Admin Pages. Because:
    • Exhibit A, B, C.
    • There is already a button in the admin menu on the left.
    • The position of the button changes depending on the length of the title, disorienting users.
    • On mobile, especially, it makes the page look broken as a result of the above mentioned issue.
• Alerts – Alerts like updating WordPress, often cannot be dismissed and they take up vertical space. We propose we introducing an alert icon in the upper right of the admin bar. It would have a badge for alert count. When hovered or selected you see the alerts. They can be global or contextual to that page. And can be permanently dismissed (maybe in a future release set to reappear later). This way they don’t take up the vertical space, allow mobile users to not scroll down for 10 years on every page reload, and can control the insane number of alerts various Plugins feel the need to display (albeit justifiably in some cases).
• Forced Grayscale Icons – In the back end, in the navigation, some icons are colored when they should be grayscale. This is common with Premium Plugins and I propose the Core permit us to implement a CSS filter to force them to be grayscale. However, as developers catch on it could be overwritten, so we’d need to figure out how to solve that problem.
• Quick Edit Bar for Post / Post Type pages. – We built this.
• Better WP Admin Navigation – Currently the WP admin menu is single-tier. This forces some developers to create it’s own admin menu – creating distraction, clutter and scroll. Also, the nav menu does not function well on mobile when you compare it to something like ShiftNav. We propose implementing something like ShiftNav (see our website by shrinking the browser). Notice how it allows multiple teirs of navigation. Very smooth. Works on desktop and mobile. Much more to discuss on this.

By: Spencer Hill

Categorized in: Programming, WordPress

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