This post is a summary of the tenth (!) call for testing for the FSE outreach program. Per usual, I love an excuse to celebrate so here are some fun stats to continue the party:

• There have been Italian translations for nearly every single call for testing thanks to @piermario. This consistent hard work has allowed folks from the Italian community to better stay up to date and involved in these efforts.
• There have been numerous Japanese translations and group calls for testing through WordCamp Japan thanks to @mimitips @ippei-sumida @atachibana (and likely others!). Similar to the Italian translations, it’s wonderful to see a pathway created here for the Japanese community to be involved.
• @paaljoachim has responded to every single call for testing with comprehensive feedback each time! It’s wildly helpful to have someone be so consistent in exploring each test over time.
• There have been 69 badges given to folks who have responded to the various calls for testing with an average of 1.6 replies per person (meaning most folks don’t just contribute once). 

Thank you to every single person who has come along for the first ten calls for testing. Here’s to at least ten more (Twenty more? Thirty more?). 

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For this specific release, I want to offer special thanks to @piermario for the Italian translation, Yoast for focusing attention on this call for testing for their latest contributor day, and @sparklingrobots for bravely walking through their experience for the call for testing on a hallway hangout.

Finally, shout out to the following folks as first time contributors to a call for testing: @evarlese, @oksankaa, @nynkedeblaauw, @suascat_wp, @mikes41720, @iamyvonne, @adetolah, @josevarghese, @ankurchauhan126. Get excited – you now have a testing contributor badge on your WordPress profile!

High level Feedback

Here’s what a few folks had to say about the overall experience that can help frame the following more specific feedback. Generally speaking, most folks found problems with more of the details of the experience rather than running into any major blockers with UX, crashing, bugs, etc that prevented them from doing what they wanted to do. Tied to this, much of the feedback centered around the desire to be able to go even further than what’s currently possible, which is reflected in the robust Feature Requests section.

While some things are still not totally intuitive to new users, I feel that Gutenberg made more big steps ahead in just a few months. I enjoy creating content in it and some of the things I have in mind are easier to achieve.

@piermario 

It’s been fun testing out the ‘query loop’ block in FSE. No crashes or bugs. The saving worked properly. 

@mikes41720

Confirmed bugs

What follows are confirmed bugs that break expected functionality or the experience of different features. Thankfully, there were only a few of these items!

• Wide alignment does not work correctly in the editor for the Query Loop block.
• Query Loop block toolbar does not scale down well.
• Not all blocks are shown in Inserter when selecting the Column inner block, making it seem as if you can’t add many blocks.

General Usability Feedback

Overall, most of the feedback for this section surrounded taking very specific actions or insights around how pieces fit together rather than a massive gap in the experience or a blocker to accomplishing a task. As a result, I’ve included more quotes than usual below to help give more context to what was shared. Of note, some are repeat items from previous tests and are labeled as such below. 

• It’s not clear when you are adding a theme block outside of the Query Loop vs within. In this case, it was confusing when the Post Comment Count block wasn’t properly displaying the number of comments and it wasn’t clear the issue was that it needed to be within the loop. There’s an open issue to discuss this general phenomenon.
• Frustration around the two step saving process and feeling like it is slowing the process down. There are designs in progress to improve this experience to make it easier, at a glance to know what’s happening.
• The W menu item proves to be a point of confusion, especially when trying to go back to the dashboard. This was brought up by four folks very recently if you include the comments on this additional design post (repeat).
• The “create new post” in the description for Query Loop block feels like it runs the risk of breaking someone out of the site editing experience.
• There was confusion around using the different filters for the Query Loop block that lines up nicely with this broader discussion and exploration around a more intuitive “Query Builder”.
• The Post title block color settings are hard to get right since it changes based on whether you make the title a link or not (repeat).
• It’s not obvious how you can customize the Read more link text with folks often not always understanding that you can (repeat).
• Make it easier to switch back to the initial pattern for the Query Loop block (repeat).
• Provide a way to view the template while editing a post (repeat).
• When selecting categories to filter with the Query Loop block, allow the categories to be in a list rather than needing to be manually typed out (repeat).
• Desire for a revamp of the Query Loop block settings in general as there is repeated confusion around where settings are (block toolbar vs sidebar, improving the settings language). Some design ideas around a Query Loop builder were shared to address this as this test continued.
• Every nested block takes on the styles set in theme.json, which felt unexpected and lacking nuance (no issue created).

For the Query Block specifically, I’m not sure if this is expected, but I didn’t find a way to get back to the initial layout options if I wanted to change.

@evarlese

I had to open a new tab and go to Posts -> Categories and check out the names of the categories. It would be very useful with the multi select so that we can easily choose various categories from a drop down.

@paaljoachim

It makes sense that ‘Post Categories’ and ‘Post Tags’ blocks can only work within the Query Loop block and when editing a Post and each would display categories and tags associated with that post. However, when someone tries to insert those blocks on the Page outside the Query loop block would just drop the spinning icon. Probably, because as we know Page has no category and outside the Query Loop, it can’t query the category. ‘Categories’ block would however work.

@suascat_wp

Query Loop – the anchor link of ‘create a new post’ leads to creating a new post or page (depending on the post type chosen in the settings), but I felt like it would break interaction with full site editing since it leads you to create a totally new post or page using the block editor. 

@mikes41720

Post Excerpt – there’s a section to ‘add “read more” link text‘ (which I’m not sure what it means?) that if you click on, it doesn’t show the blinking “|” which signifies that you can add text to it (although it does work and you can add text). If you click directly right after it, it’ll then show the blinking “|” and that acts as more of a sign that you can modify and add text. It might be a bit confusing for some users from a visual cue standpoint.

@mikes41720

I’m having a hard time adding the columns within the Query Loop block unless have to do it via the help of list view.

@iamyvonne

I was playing with the theme.json and added under the styles section on the file a font size for core/post-title for the page, that syle is applyed at the root level so every nested core/post-title will inherit this stile and it’s ok abviously, it’s a css behavior, this is something to pay attention because now with blocks we must take into account much more kind of indentation of blocks than before where we had well-defined structures.

@overclokk

I’m still misled by the WordPress button in the top left corner of the Site Editor. I know that its function toggles a menu open/close, but being the WordPress logo such a familiar affordance, I often click on it in auto-mode expecting to come back to the dashboard…way too many clicks if I just want to “escape” to the dashboard or the live site.

@piermario 

I often feel the “double” saving step slows me down and in 99% of the cases, the options provided in “Select the changes you want to save” are something I don’t want to check off.

@piermario 

Feature Requests

Generally speaking, at a high level, most feature requests in this section come down to two things: more design tool options and more settings for blocks. As with the previous section, some are repeat items from previous tests and are labeled as such below. 

• General desire for more dimension controls, including specifically for more Columns controls to change the spacing between (mentioned twice, repeat).
• Desire for more options for post author block (repeat).
• Allow using featured image as background for a group block in order to add the post title on top of featured image (repeat). 
• Enable option to upload an image within the placeholder for the Featured Image block.
• Consider having the “Make title a link” setting on by default in Query Loop context for the Post Title block.
• Desire for the ability to change post excerpt length.
• Desire for more post date formats.
• Increase number of items per page for default Query Loop Block. This was mentioned by three people alone in this test and was fixed by this PR!

I was also initially surprised by 1 item per page as the default, and it took me a moment to find the settings again to change it.

@evarlese

When selecting ‘Display settings’ one can set the number of items per page. But actually you pick the number of items in the column if you choose a layout with multiple columns. May be easier to understand if ‘items per page’ would be renamed to ‘items per column’ or something similar.

@nynkedeblaauw 

Site Logo – has a Rounded style but no border radius control. It would be helpful to add the various new controls also to the Site Logo block. Dimensions panel etc.

@paaljoachim

I wish I had a margin and padding setting on the Columns block level.  

@piermario

#fse-outreach-experiment, #fse-outreach-program, #fse-testing-summary