We are at a point in the Gutenberg development where we have many new features to help people visually create, edit, and manage their site. These include, but are not limited to:
Pages & posts: Add and edit with blocks and patterns.
Template editing: the ability to customise theme templates, and create new templates ad hoc.
Styles: change the color, fonts, and layout across your site.
Template parts: Create and edit headers, footers, and other areas.
More features continue to be added and @jameskoster and I have been iterating on how we can surface these new features in a way that is both intuitive for new users and familiar to existing users. To keep the scope focused, we looked at the features in core today along with the ones that are being worked on to be considered for the 5.9 version of WP, according to this post while keeping the near future in mind as well.
To set some context
If you are already using the Gutenberg plugin, you may be familiar with the Site Editor menu item. This is where most of these new features can be found during development. While this works for the purpose of development, “Site Editing” is a broad expression that essentially spans the entirety of site management activities in WordPress. Do we want to begin down this path towards a single page app-like experience, or would it be better to keep things separate for now? It’s time to explore and design the IA (information architecture) so that we can begin to paint a picture of how we might merge this exciting functionality in to core.
Click on Appearance and you see Editor (beta) menu item. This keeps the concept of updating your look and feel of your site within the Appearance menu item, where current users are used to going to Customize. It is also intuitive for new users and matches the iterative approach product development has taken.
From there, you are brought to the homepage of your site, where you can immediately start to edit it – whether its a static page or your latest posts. Example of the latter:
From here, if you click on the W menu in the upper left corner, it opens a menu where you would be able to access Styles and Templates. And if you have any – other template parts. This navigation menu feels light right now but as more functionality gets added, this navigation could scale and grow along side it. For example, you can imagine that you’d have direct access to editing your posts and pages within here as well.
Click on Styles to update the colors, typography, and layout of your site. This also shows what a welcome guide could look like, which could be useful for big new features.
If you open the W menu again and click on Templates, you’ll view a list of all the templates you can now edit visually:
An alternative concept would be to keep template and content editing separate for now, but still bring some of the most compelling template editing functionality (like direct manipulation of headers and footers) to the post editor.
With this approach you’d edit posts and pages the way you always have, but when you open the editor there would a new option to view the full layout:
With the layout visible it becomes possible to customize the site header, footer, and any other blocks that make up the underlying template. You would also be able to invoke the Styles panel to further refine the look and feel of your site.
Theme editing has always lived in the Appearance section of the navigation, so in this concept that is where you’d go to customise and create new templates.
Template editing can be a complex exercise, so to help narrow the scope this concept keeps content and template editing separate. So instead of being populated by actual content, blocks like Post Title and Post Content display simple placeholders to help you identify them.
Editing the theme’s Page template
In the future it would be interesting to explore options that enable users to load compatible content in to the template while editing to help with testing, but it’s not essential at this stage.
One trade-off with this approach is that in order to allow users to visually edit their home page when it is set to display latest posts, we’d need to introduce a placeholder “page” in the pages list:
This somewhat breaks the idea of keeping content and template editing separate, since visiting the latest posts “page” (and the “Posts page” for that matter) on the frontend will resolve to display the home or indextemplate. Whether this trade-off is worth making may require further technical investigation and perhaps a round of usability testing, but it’s worth noting that a similar placeholder is already utilised when you create a “Posts page” in partnership with a static home page.
Curious to hear your thoughts on these ideas and alternative proposals!
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