Mondays in Australia are pretty quiet as the rest of the world slumbers after weekend activities had. It’s a great time for reflecting and catching up on things. This morning, I caught up on a few days of missed gutenberg conversations on slack and last week’s design meeting.
Balancing minimal aesthetic with traditional functionality
Exploring concepts – a quick prototype of today’s ideas
Things move pretty fast in this space. Reading through the comment threads, a couple of remarks inspired my thoughts today, and led me to explore a few ideas (you can check out a quick prototype here).
Writing and layout are two wholly different functions. The more the editor is suited to writing, the less it is suited to layout. And the inverse. It seems to me the way to get around this inherent conflict is to have two modes: Preview (Layout) and Writer @foliovision
I think the multi-modes idea is similar to ‘working in flows’ and does have merit. Something like write -> customise -> publish feels natural. It shouldn’t be a compulsory flow though. Ideally developers will be able to publish different workflow plugins to modify this behaviour @chemicalsailor
Should we be pulling apart and re-imagining a bit more…?
While I do agree with both @foliovision and @chemicalsailor, I also wonder whether we are rushing into solution mode without interrogating the status quo of what it means to edit in WordPress enough. Are concepts like writing and layout really distinct? Should they be? Is what is natural to us today, such as write-customise-publish natural because it follows the way we write stories, or is it natural because it is what we have become used to?
Today, I have no answers, but am inspired by the questions that were triggered by the conversations over the last week!
Related material
Parrot: an integrated site builder and editor concept for WordPress (a well developed discussion of some of the ideas sketched out here)
Gutenberg project on github – Prototype 1, Prototype 2, Ella’s prototype
WordPress #design conversation from last week
Observations from user tests of first gutenberg prototype
