Help Wordpress Developers
Ms. Jane Wells is soliciting the WP community to come up with a more elegant layout for the administrator’s dashboard in the upcoming version of WP. Posted on April 25, 2009, the development blog post titled “Design Tweaks: Who’s In? (An idea in three acts)” is asking the community to take up a short notice design idea for possible inclusion in WP 2.8. As you are probably already aware, it wasn’t long ago that the Has-Patch Marathon was announced in a similar “shot gun” fashion. Result of the 24 hour Marathon have already been posted. The present WP designing marathon promised to be no less dramatic and interesting.
Okay, so here’s the deal. Modifying the nav/header to be a little nicer is was a last-minute design idea, and if it can’t be worked out in the time we have left before 2.8 (which is very little), we’ll just wait until 2.9 to work on it. But! If someone comes up with something the community really likes and it doesn’t break any of the design guidelines for the rest of WordPress, we could sneak it in.
The Guidelines for WP 2.8 Navigation Design lists four particular areas in need of attention. And as was mentioned in the quotation, if this issue is not handled in the short term, it will be addressed in the Wordpress 2.9. A Wordpress .PSD file has been released for community tweaking. If enough submissions are obtained in the short period of time, then there will be an opportunity to vote on which proposed layout will find its way into WP 2.8.
We’ll only keep voting open for one day because of the 2.8 deadline, so put it on your calendar if you think you’ll forget. Voting will close at 2am Wednesday, April 29 UTC (8pm Tuesday, April 28, New York time). Results will be announced the following day.
The proposed layout might end up looking something like this:
WP 2.8 Admin Dashboard? |
Jane has also set up a forum for people to discuss the design challenge. On a side note, it appears that WP 2.8 has addressed and corrected many existing issues found in previous WP versions (see Wordpress Trac). While most people will not notice the difference between WP 2.8 and WP 2.7.1, there have been enough improvement and bugfixes to warrant a WP site update.
Comments on this entry are closed.