DocsWP — WordPress Help

DASH Plugin Update

Accomplished this week

Some good progress this week.

1) @Joen worked on the following mockup:

2) v0.1 of plugin committed.

3) We held our second IRC chat on Tuesday in #wordpress-ui.

Joen shared his mockup (shown above). There was a bunch of great feedback specific to that mockup. Thanks again to everyone who participated! Here are some high level notes from that conversation.

  • Putting the “Content” part of “Right Now” into a fixed footer didn’t fly. I’ve explored alternatives, and I’m in fact leaning towards ditching the entire thing.
  • The vertical separator which is a slider didn’t look draggable, and it looked like a fancy scrollbar.
  • The icon styling wasn’t WordPressy enough
  • Explore alternative stylings for the “cards”
  • Show only the activity we actually have access to right now
  • Explore the notion that we know which parts of the “Activity stream” are new compared to your last visit (hence the “Welcome back” text)

4) @dbernar1 (Dan) did some clean up on my initial plugin commit

5) Dan started work on merging QuickPress and Recent Drafts.

6) Joen worked on another mockup:

  • New card style with rounded corners and a soft shadow.
  • No icons, they weren’t really helping.
  • “3 new comments since your last visit” and “recent comments” — they’re part of the same screen. I imagine this. A fresh dash says “Howdy”, and we set a cookie time. Recent Comments takes up all the space under “publishing soon”. Next time you visit (day++), the dash says “Welcome back”. Comments that trickled in over night now show up.
  • The 3 dot draggability slider indicator is now at the top of the separator.

7) I created a new trac ticket requesting a temporary hook be added to simplify our QuickPress & Recent Draft widget merge.

Where we need help

  • We need someone with commit access to get the temporary hook that I mentioned above added (see #7 above). This is a blocker for us, so it would be great if we could get this added ASAP.
  • I’d love some feedback on my combined RSS feed patch.
  • We’d love some feedback on Joen’s latest mockup (#6 above)
  • We’ve still got a pretty small crew. If any of this looks interesting to you, please ping me on IRC (lessbloat). We’ve got a side-channel Skype room where we’re discussing a bunch of stuff related to this project. Just let me know, and I’ll get you added to the room.

Up next

#dash