Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle — the CTO of Human Made — and Brian Krogsgard.
WordPress 4.5 was just released, and comes backed with a lot of great new features. Some of our favorites have to do with the editing experience, but we go over all the new user facing features as well as under the hood bits of WordPress 4.5. We also dig into the earliest stages of WordPress 4.6, which is already underway.
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This podcast is sponsored by WP101. The WP101 Plugin delivers a set of WordPress video tutorials right in your clients’ dashboard, freeing your time to do what you do best! They also just released a great 22 part course on WooCommerce that you should definitely check out. Thank you to WP101 for being a Post Status partner.
Thanks for the in-depth discussion on Selective Refresh. I did want to point out that while Selective Refresh does provide an architectural foundation for being able to do frontend-editing of registered partials, the actual capability has not been implemented since it is still just a concept. So users shouldn’t go looking for that feature yet 🙂
Since partials have CSS selectors associated with them, there are then targets in the document for where controls can be attached. Doing actual inline editing is problematic as noted in your podcast, where there are huge challenges with theme compatibility and how to represent WYSIWYG UIs that don’t get in the way of the preview. Take the example of editing the site title: at first it seems reasonable to just add
contenteditable="true"to that element to allow editing, something experimented with in Customize Inline Editing. The issue here is that you edit the raw values whereas the preview is displaying the rendered values. This was the problem with thepostMessagepreviews for editing the site title: it would use the rawblognameand then the preview would miss out on anywptexturizefilters applied on the server’s rendered value. This was fixed in Core via Selective Refresh in #33738. One approach could be to show the raw value while editing, but then show the rendered value when focus on the element is removed. But yeah, this isn’t a great experience and it would be much worse if doing inline editing of post content, where shortcodes and other elements could appear very differently in raw edit mode vs rendered preview mode.So instead of inline editing I’d like to see frontend editing look like being able to bootstrap the Customizer into the frontend context, lazy-loading the Customizer pane in place without having to go to
customize.php. The controls can then be located in the pane as usual, and/or we could experiment with letting the control float next to the partial for the settings that it manipulates.Oh, speaking of secret features like paste-URL-to-make-link: something you didn’t mention is a Selective Refresh “hiddenhancement” where any partial you register will automatically receive a “Shift click to edit” ability. So you can now shift-click on the site title, tagline, custom logo, nav menu items, and widgets and the corresponding controls in the Customizer pane will be expanded into view and focused. See #27403 for improving the discoverability of this feature.
Customizer Device Previewer
The point of the device previewer in the Customizer is to make live previews resizable, that is to say, if you’ve changed something but haven’t yet saved it you can preview it on different viewport sizes.
Yeah, you can resize your browser manually to see how it would look, but you wouldn’t be able to “try before you buy”, so to speak. You’d have to save it, then resize, then change it and save it, and resize, and so on.
Embed Templates
One use case I’m actually surprised to have not seen in the wild yet is embed templates for product post types. I can easily see wanting to be able to embed products in your site or other sites (maybe affiliates?) in a nicely formatted way.