Mel Choyce

  • 2017 in Reflection

    For many people, myself included, 2017 has been an exhausting year.

    I started off the year in a haze of anxiety and fear over the US election — a haze that only really stopped when I very intentionally stepped back from social media for a little while and tried to give myself some space. I donated when I could, and voted in my local elections, but otherwise feel like I didn't give enough or do enough to counteract all of the awfulness going on in my country. I've felt powerless and paralyzed. In 2018, I want to find sustainable ways to empower myself and my communities.

    Improving my mental health was a focus of 2017. I was, quite honestly, a disaster in the beginning of the year. I experienced multiple panic attacks. After a significant amount of time and effort, I was finally able to see a psychiatrist. (Seriously y'all, why is it so hard?) For most of my life I've been opposed to medication (for myself, not others), but my anxiety meds have made a world of difference for me. My stress and anxiety are manageable, and actually reflective of reality, rather than high-key all the time for no reason. I feel like going out and being social again. I haven't had any more panic attacks. It took a lot of work, but getting the mental health support I needed was worth it.

    My family went through a lot of pain and strife this year, which took up a great amount of mental and financial resources. I think — hope? — it brought us closer together, and we made it through the year intact. I'm considering that a success. I hope next year brings some much deserved peace and prosperity to my family.

    Work was pretty intense this year. I took on a lot more responsibility than I thought myself capable of handling. In a lot of ways, I was right — I made a lot of mistakes this year. I got mired in details that didn't matter as much as the bigger picture. I learned and grew quite a bit. I led a WordPress release and it actually went pretty well. I learned a lot about my work habits (and my brain) that I'll be able to put to good use next year. I'm starting out 2018 with a professional coach, to help keep myself on track and focused, and to learn even more about how I can make the best use of my skills. Better late than never, eh?

    A lot of people supported me this year:

    • My partner Kelly, who was with me every step of the way. Thanks for always supporting me, cheering me on, and being patient with me despite many of this year's hurdles. Thanks for listening to me rant, and helping me deal with the enormous work and family stress I was under this year. I hope I can always be as good a partner for you as you've been for me. 
    • My older brother Chris, who saw our family through some incredibly tough times this year. Thanks for your composure, your leadership, and for making sure our family got through the year with a roof over everyone's heads. This year would have been a whole lot harder without you.
    • My coworker and friend Tammie, who was my cheerleader the whole year. Thanks for the check-ins, the support and confidence, and for checking my work to make sure I was showing my best.
    • My team lead Josepha, who helped me through many difficult situations and worked hard to find the best way to support me. Thanks for listening, and for keeping me on-track.
    • My WordPress release buddies Weston and Jeff. I couldn't have made it through the year without either of you. We did it together.
    • All my wonderful internet friends. I love you all ❀
    • My therapist. Paying someone for professional emotional labor is the shit, y'all. A++ would recommend.

    2017 was hard. Damn hard. I hope that it's made me stronger, more resilient, and a better friend, coworker, and partner.

    Here's to 2018.

    mel

    , , , ,

  • WordPress 4.9 Released

    Two years, I was sitting around a table of WordPress core and community leaders, swearing that I'd never lead a WordPress release. Yesterday, along with my Co-Lead Weston Ruter and Deputy Lead Jeff Paul, I released WordPress 4.9.

    WordPress 4.9 “Tipton”

    It feels a little like we've been working on this release forever. We kicked off the process in June, and since then we've been designing and building features to improve site customization. Launching last night felt shocking, and a relief. I've had many large projects launch in my career, but nothing as potentially impactful as this. I am still in awe of it all.

    This was the first WordPress release where we've really embraced the co-leadership of design and development, and I think it was successful. Weston's organization and attention to detail really kept us on track. I am kind of a passionate individual (my friends are probably laughing now), and having such a solid co-lead to temper me really helped balance out this release. There's no way I would have been able to do this without him.

    Weston wasn't the only organized one this release — without Jeff Paul, we would have been mired in the day-to-day planning. Having Jeff to keep track of meetings, check in with us, and review each stage of the release allowed us the freedom to focus on product decisions. His contributions have been immeasurable.

    I am also thankful to 443 contributors who made this release possible. Over four hundred people! That's amazing. Among them are some fantastic developers I collaborated with almost constantly throughout the release: Konstantin Obenland, Sayed Taqui, and Brandon Payton. Michelle Weber and Krista Stevens provided much-needed copywriting help. Kathryn Presner's tremendous expertise in customer support and success helped make sure we were solving the right problems.

    Lastly, there's no way I would have made it through this process without the emotional support of my friends and teammates at Automattic. My team lead Josepha Chomphosy listened to my every wish, complaint, and worry; both her advice and leadership helped me solve many issues throughout the release. Tammie Lister was my constant cheerleader and was gracious enough to review all of my design work, and provided me with crucial puppy videos during the final hours. Gary Pendergast was always there to remind me to have some fun and reassure me when I was worried I would fail. And how could I leave out my partner Kelly Dwan, who suffered through chaos, long nights, and probably too much delivery food over the past couple months with nothing but love and support?

    WordPress is a group endeavour, and I am so honored to work with all of you.

    mel

    ,

  • What’s Coming in WordPress 4.9

    As y’all might remember, I’m currently co-leading the release of WordPress 4.9. Since we’re winding down toward release, I wanted to take the opportunity to walk through some of the key features of the release.

    Drafting and scheduling changes in the Customizer

    This slideshow requires JavaScript.

    In WordPress 4.9, you’ll be able to draft your customizations before publishing them, or schedule them to go live in the future.

    Imagine you’ve just started a new site — you have an introduction post up, but otherwise you’re still working on finishing up the design of your site. Now you can draft your changes and come back to them later, so when you are ready to go live, your site looks perfect.

    Another scenario: let’s say your store is having a holiday sale. Rather than staying up until midnight to add a banner about the sale to your homepage, now you can add that new section to your homepage and schedule it to go live later. Once the sale is live, you can hop back in and schedule it’s removal after the holidays. Much less of a hassle!

    Additionally, these new features includes a quick way to share a link to preview your changes on the front-end that anyone can view, not just your site users. Now you can easily share your design updates with clients and teammates before publishing them.

    We’ve also made it safer to make changes in the Customizer. We’ve introduced “locking” (like post locking), so two people can’t work on the same changes at once. This prevents people from overwriting each other’s updates. Hurrah!

    Finally, if you leave the Customizer with unsaved changes, when you come back you’re presented with the option of restoring those changes, which autosaved. Harder to lose your work. ?

    A unified theme browsing experience

    This slideshow requires JavaScript.

    Since the WordPress 4.2 release, you’ve been able to browse and preview your installed themes from within the Customizer, so you can try a bunch of themes before committing to one. 4.9 iterates and expands on this work. Now, you can also search, filter, and browse themes from the WordPress.org theme directory directly from the Customizer. This means once you start setting up your site, you won’t have to leave the Customizer when trying to find the perfect theme. It’s just one step closer to a completely comprehensive, Customizer-driven site building experience.

    Once you find a new theme you like, switching to that theme has become even easier. Previously, when switching themes, your menus and widgets had a bad habit of coming unassigned, so you’d have to go back and re-add them to your site. We’ve added some improvements to menus and widgets so you can feel even more comfortable with trying out a new look.

    Widget Improvements

    Following up on the Image, Video, and Audio widgets we created in WordPress 4.8, we’re introducing a Gallery widget in 4.9. Secondly, you can now add media directly to your Text widgets for mixed-media content.

    Both of these improvements bring us closer to converging with Gutenbergfeatures — it’ll be much easier to migrate widgets to blocks in the future.

    Menu improvements

    In usability testing, we’ve consistently found that people struggle with creating menus and adding new pages to their menus in the Customizer. I’ve watched easily a dozen tests in which someone went to “Add new menu,” hoping it would let them add a new page to their menu (rather than creating an entirely new menu to put on their site). It wasn’t intuitive.

    Coming in 4.9 is a new flow for creating menus in the Customizer, focusing on splitting up tasks into more manageable chunks and clear, friendly instructions. I worked with our local Happiness Engineers and Editorial team to simplify and clear up confusion around the specific interactions. Team work made the dream work, y’all.

    Better, safer code editing

    I wrote a bit about this in August, but one of the major improvements coming to 4.9 relates to code editing across the WordPress admin.

    For example, syntax highlighting and error checking have been added to:

    • The native WordPress plugin and theme editors
    • The “Additional CSS” panel in the Customizer
    • The Custom HTML widget, introduced in 4.8.1

    Of these, my favorite is definitely the improvements to Additional CSS. Most of the sites I build nowadays use existing themes, so I don’t need to do a bunch of custom coding, but I always want to tweak the design a bit. We’ve had syntax highlighting for a while on WordPress.com, but now I’ll finally be able to use this on my self-hosted sites, too. We’ve also added autocompletion, which makes writing CSS even faster!

    We’ve also made it MUCH safer to make edits in the theme/plugin code editors. We also warn folk before entering the theme/plugin code editors now that you can mess up your site, and make folks click an “I Understand” button before proceeding. And now, if you leave out a semicolon or call an undefined function, instead of white-screening your site, we catch the error and stop you from saving until you fix it.

    Keep an eye out for WordPress 4.9, launching November 14th! And remember, always keep your WordPress sites up-to-date. ?

    mel

    ,

  • Building 10 non-profit sites in 8 hours on WordPress.com

    Note: this post was originally published on one of our new Automattic design blogs. 

    This past weekend, a few of my colleagues and I participated in Out in Tech‘s Digital Corps hackathon in NYC. Along with about fifty other volunteers, we worked to create websites on WordPress.com for ten international organizations fighting to protect LGBTQ+ rights.

    Because participants were constrained to building sites on WordPress.com, it was a great opportunity to see folks using our platform “in the wild.” As a designer, watching groups use WordPress.com was an incredibly valuable opportunity.

    Throughout the day, teams asked my colleagues and me for help on various issues, and a couple trends started to emerge:

    • Each team had 5–8 people building the site at the same time. This collaboration ended up being a challenge — folks accidentally overwrote each other’s work a couple times, and constantly had to check in with each other about who was working on which pages and who was customizing the site. This is a great opportunity for WordPress.com to develop better tools for collaboration.
    • My perpetual usability nemesis, pages and menus, reared its ugly head. Many groups struggled with the relationship between menus and pages, which I’ve been trying to improve in the core WordPress software this year. Additionally, people needed help creating “folders” in their menus (a top level menu item that isn’t clickable, but contains child pages in a dropdown), and adding category pages to their menus.
    • We recently rolled out Simple Payments on WordPress.com, which many of the groups wanted to use to add donation buttons to their organization’s sites. However, it wasn’t clear to them that Simple Payments could be used for donations. We’re looking at ways to improve this feature, so this is very timely feedback.

    After the hackathon, we reported these findings back to the rest of our team at WordPress.com. We also found a couple of bugs!

    WordPress.com ended up being a good platform for a hackthon because of its constraints. I encouraged teams to draw from our collection of themes instead of installing an outside theme, which meant that setup was consistent and well documented.

    At least one team experimented with a different theme after setting up the site, and the similar standards between themes on WordPress.com made that much easier than if they’d used a third-party theme.

    Because teams were given a curated set of themes and plugins, they were able to quickly make decisions and get down to the information architecture and customization of their sites. Limiting the scope allowed folks to really focus on getting something up in a day. And, with WordPress.com Business as an option, the teams that wanted to install additional plugins were able to.

    One of the greatest parts of the day was becoming acquainted with the organizations we built sites for. Many of the organizations are based in countries where queer people face tremendous discrimination, hate, and legal barriers preventing them from living their lives safely and authentically.

    Here are the ten sites we built:

    As a queer person with an incredibly accepting family, who has lived in fairly tolerant places my entire life, I am extremely privileged. Most queer folks aren’t nearly as lucky. Supporting the LGBT+ community through technology is one way I can pay it forward.

    If having a website makes it any easier for these organizations to receive funding, support their local communities, and push for legal and societal change, then I want to do everything I can to help. I’m thankful that Automattic feels the same, and that we’re in a position to sponsor events that can make a difference.

    mel

    , ,

  • Remembering my first month at Automattic

    Every year, Automattic comes together in one place to do a company meetup. This year is my fifth time attending our company meetup (called the “Grand Meetup”). During this week, we have the choice of taking a class or working on a project. I was lucky enough to get admitted into the Art of Writing class this year! My first assignment is to write about the most valuable lesson I learned during my first month at Automattic.

    This was quite a while ago — my first month at Automattic was over four years ago! — so it’s taken me some time to recall my initial impressions. Thinking back on it, I had a pretty cool first month.

    Every new Automattician spends their first three weeks doing customer support. (I’ve written more about this topic in the past.) My first couple weeks were a little different than most new Automattician’s. I spent two weeks doing my support rotation, in which I learned a whole ton about WordPress.com and our products.

    However, the team I was joining after my support rotation had an in-person meetup planned during my third week. To give me a chance to meet my new teammates in person, I was lucky enough that I got to interrupt my support rotation and head to Chicago for a week!

    After the meetup ended, I returned home for my last week of support, filled with excitement about my new job.

    Throughout that busy first month, I learned that my coworkers are the most important resource I have at Automattic, and I should go to them for support and help whenever I needed it. Every time I felt lost or confused, my amazing, friendly coworkers were there to help me through my problem.

    During my support rotation, I’m sure I was super annoying (I asked so many questions) but everyone I received help from was incredibly patient and kind. When I got stuck, they’d walk me through the problem I was tackling in a way that helped me find the answer for myself, rather than just giving me the answer. It helped me learn how to find the right answers myself.

    During the week of my team meetup, I plunged into the deep end. Suddenly I went from learning all about our products and how to help customers, to needing to learn how to interact with our product from the development side. I needed to learn about how to set up and use my sandbox, commit code via SVN… it was overwhelming, to say the least.

    As a designer, my experience working with command line and sandboxes was extremely limited. My teammates were incredibly patient with me and helped me learn how to use these new development tools. Without their help, there’s no way I would have been able to even get started. They helped me set up my development environment, provided a bunch of tips and tricks I’d need, and encouraged me when I started to get frustrated by the whole process. My teammates turned what could have been a very overwhelming experience into something I could handle with my limited development knowledge and skillset.

    I’m thankful that I have such amazing coworkers, and that helping each other is built into the Automattic creed:

    I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything.

    In my experience, every Automattician takes this to heart. I’ve never worked with a better group of folks.

    Does this sound awesome? Automattic is hiring! Come join our team of helpful heroes.

    mel

  • From No Code to Pro Code

    Note: this post was originally published on our new Automattic design blog. 

    I’m lucky that Automattic sponsors my time to work on the core WordPress software full-time. This allows me the time and focus to take on more leadership responsibilities in the community, including my current role as Customization Design Lead and the co-lead for the upcoming WordPress 4.9 release. ✌

    One of our major goals during the 4.9 development cycle is to improve the various code editing portions of WordPress: the code editor for plugins and themes, the CSS editor in the Customizer, and the new HTML widget.

    Screen Shot 2017-08-21 at 4.14.53 PM
    Screen Shot 2017-08-21 at 4.14.38 PM

    Screen Shot 2017-08-21 at 4.16.28 PM
    Screen Shot 2017-08-21 at 4.21.52 PM

    The current editors in WordPress

    This is a controversial decision. Many people believe that WordPress should remove code editing, for many good reasons! At the very least, the theme and plugin code editors make it very easy to break your site. If you don’t backup your site regularly, this can be anything from a couple minute inconvenience to a catastrophe. ?

    I’m of two minds: that yes, we either need to remove the editors entirely, or
 we need to make them better, and safer for people to use.

    After reflecting, my co-lead and I decided that making them better and safer can have more of a positive impact. WordPress has been a gateway for many new web designers, developers, and builders on the web. I’ve personally met dozens of people who became web professionals because they worked on a WordPress website, and poked around on it for a while. Seeing your site’s source code is, in my opinion, an integral part of this process.

    There’s many ways we can improve the editors:

    • Add syntax highlighting, so it becomes easier to read and write code in the editors.
    • Introduce warnings that inform people that editing the code can break their site.
    • Encourage folks to learn about version control, backups, and safe editing of their site’s code.
    • Redirect people who just want to update CSS to the Additional CSS section of the Customizer.
    • Provide instructions on making a child theme.
    • Don’t let people save code we know is broken.

    By improving the editors and introducing better warnings, and even code linting, we’re creating a teachable moment for new web users. By providing some protection against saving broken code, we’re helping folks safely edit their sites — versus now, where you can just save anything and totally whitescreen your site (which I’ve done before ?).

    One of my biggest breakthrough moments in WordPress was learning how to create a child theme, which allowed me to safely edit themes to my client’s specifications. Suddenly, I had much more control over the site I was building. It felt magical! The code editors seem like the perfect place to introduce this concept, and maybe even create a simple way to make a child theme from WordPress itself.

    Screen Shot 2017-08-21 at 4.13.03 PM
    Screen Shot 2017-08-21 at 4.14.05 PM

    Screen Shot 2017-08-21 at 5.15.16 PM
    Screen Shot 2017-08-21 at 5.13.38 PM

    Coming in 4.9: syntax highlighting in the code editors in WordPress

    I see these various improvements as a way to encourage WordPress users to grow into developers. Creating an ecosystem that supports teaching new developers is an important part of WordPress’ influence on the web, and only through providing a way to safely play can we hope to grow. ?

    Interested in helping out? You can get involved on GitHub.

    mel

    ,

  • Back to Childhood: Blocks are the Future

    Note: this post was originally published on our new Automattic design blog. Also check out my previous post about the future of site building & customization in WordPress for more context to this post.

    Photo by Tiffany Terry

    Last month, my colleague Joen wrote a great post about blocks and the Editor Focus for WordPress in 2017. Joen designed a fantastic blueprint for blocks in WordPress that the Customization Focus will continue to flesh out and build on over the next year.

    Recently, I’ve been starting to look at converting widgets in WordPress to Gutenberg blocks. Widgets are the bits of content you can currently drop into your sidebar or footer in WordPress — like the recently updated image widget, some text, or a search bar.

    Current Widget Panel in the WordPress Customizer

    Updating some of these widgets to use Gutenberg’s block patterns has been quite easy — they are simple blocks of content without a lot of settings. However, some widgets are quite complex. Turning them into blocks has been a challenge.

    Take, for example, the Categories widget. It creates a list of all your post categories, and links to the archive pages for those categories. It’s very useful for the large number of bloggers who organize the blog posts on their site using categories. The Categories widget comes with a couple options:

    • Display categories in a dropdown, instead of a list.
    • Display the number of posts in each category.
    • Display category hierarchy, if you have parent and child categories on your blog.

    These options are easy to present in a block:

    Proposed Gutenberg Category Block — Check it out on GitHub

    The widget settings work well in the “Inspector” on the right, while the block itself is previewed inside of your post or page editor (and eventually your whole site).

    Not all widgets are this easy to turn into blocks. Let’s take a look at Recent Posts widget, which shows a list of your most recently published posts. At first, it seems just as simple as the Category widget, right? Well, what if we took this opportunity to improve the widget while we turn it into a block?

    Currently, you can control the numbers of posts listed in the Recent Posts widget, and you can choose to display post dates. That seems like a good start for a sidebar, but what if you wanted to show a list of posts on your homepage? You’ll probably want to show more details about the post.

    Looking at popular blogging websites and themes, many include the post’s featured image, and either an excerpt, or the content of the whole post. Let’s add that to our list.

    Many sites and themes also show posts as a grid, not a list. What if we gave folks the option of choosing between a list or a grid layout? If we support grids, we’ll likely also want to let people choose how the maximum number of columns in which to display their posts on larger screens.

    Now, our feature list looks like this:

    • List view or grid view
    • Number of posts to show
    • Columns (only if grid view)
    • Display date
    • Display featured image
      • Featured image size (taken from your site settings)
    • Display post content
      • Excerpt
      • Full post

    More powerful, but also much more complex!

    This slideshow requires JavaScript.

    Proposed Gutenberg Post Block — Check it out on GitHub

    However, the block is still mostly controlled through a list of options in the Inspector. What about a block that you need to build, like the Custom Menu widget?

    At its most basic, this could be a simple block. The widget is pretty simple: just choose an existing menu from a dropdown, and it displays that menu in your widget. This isn’t great, though, since you need to know to make the menu first. It’s a pain and it breaks your flow.

    In a future where all of the navigation menus on your site are blocks, it seems more important to let you actually build that menu where you’re adding a block. We don’t have any established patterns for a task like menu-building yet, so we need to establish some.

    Core contributor Joshua Wold kicked off the brainstorming with a great sketch:

    Proposed Gutenberg Menu Block by Joshua Wold — Check it out on GitHub

    Within the block, you can choose an existing menu, or create a new menu. If you choose to create a new menu, you can drag pages over from the Inspector (or click on them) into the block to build your menu. This is similar to how menus currently work in the Customizer.

    Another direction we can take is cutting out the confusion of duplicate menus, and building the block to make one-off menus instead. That could look something like this:

    This slideshow requires JavaScript.

    Another Proposed Gutenberg Menu Block — Check it out on GitHub

    This block is still being explored. If you have ideas, you can post them on the GitHub issue! We’d love to see more folks involved in shaping the future of WordPress.

    I hope, by tackling the hard widgets (and shortcodes!) now, we’ll establish all the key patterns and lead the way for other plugins and themes to convert their custom widgets into blocks. I’d like to help create an ecosystem where page builder builders and premium themes can continue to flourish, while remaining consistent and compatible with core WordPress design patterns. Hopefully we’re off to a good start! ?

    Thanks to Joen and Tammie for their ongoing support and feedback as I explore these new block designs!

    mel

    , , , ,

  • Fight for Net Neutrality

    When viewing the homepage of my site today, you might become a little impatient. This is the future we face if we lose Net Neutrality:

    “Net Neutrality” is the simple but very powerful principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally. Whether you’re reading a blog post on WordPress.com, streaming Game of Thrones on HBO GO, or browsing handcrafted tea cozies on Etsy, your Internet service provider delivers the Internet to you at the same speed, without blocking, throttling, or charging extra tolls based on the content you’re viewing. You can learn more about Net Neutrality and why it’s important by visiting battleforthenet.com.

    — Join Us in the Fight for Net Neutrality

    If you’re interested in joining the fight, you can write a message of support on battleforthenet.com, or add the Net Neutrality plugin to your self-hosted WordPress site.

    mel

    ,

  • Building a Site That’s Right for You

    Note: this post was originally published on our new Automattic design blog. Check it out!

    Hello everyone! ? I’m Mel Choyce, a product designer on the Apollo team here at Automattic. Apollo is comprised of the Automatticians who contribute full-time to the open source side of WordPress over at WordPress.org. I’m the design co-lead of WordPress’ customization focus for 2017. Prior to joining Apollo to work on this focus, I was on another team at Automattic that whose mission was making site building and customization easier on WordPress.com.

    Customization has been a pretty big pain point in WordPress for a number of years. With the emergence of easy to customize, drag-and-drop website builders like Squarespace, Wix, and Weebly, WordPress’ minimal customization tools have been falling further and further behind. To make sweeping changes to your WordPress website, you still mostly need to know PHP. This is totally unrealistic in 2017! In the case of WordPress.com, where we don’t let people edit their website templates, this means you can’t make any big changes to your site (like easily adding recent posts to your homepage or swapping the position of your logo or your navigation menu).

    This is painful. There are so many “why can’t I just
” situations that really trip people up when setting up their sites on WordPress, myself included! For someone like a business owner with no time, that kind of barrier means they’re going to give up and try somewhere else. The platform they move to will likely be closed and proprietary. If their business grows and they need to scale up their website, being on a closed platform like Squarespace will make that even more difficult.

    We want the web to remain open. To ensure it stays that way, WordPress needs to step up its game and make it easier for everyone to make websites, from bloggers, to business owners, to web designers and developers. As a platform, we need to embrace all of these use cases.

    Enter this year’s customization focus. For the first half of this year, I’ve been collaborating with my development co-lead, Weston Ruter, and a couple other key contributors to fix some low-hanging fruit. We’ve identified these small but impactful updates a couple ways:

    • Looking through existing Trac tickets that feel like they would be small projects, but would make a big impact.
    • Building lots of test sites in WordPress, using “real” scenarios so we’re not just aimlessly putting dummy content into a site.
    • Reviewing previous usability tests that touched on site building and customization.
    • Chatting with folks who help support bloggers and business users who are building their own websites to find out what problems people encounter most frequently.

    Using this, we’ve come up with a list of projects that we’ve been slowly working our way through the past couple months, like adding a new image widget, and adding formatting options to the text widget.

    The four widget updates coming to WordPress soon: Image, Video, Audio, and Rich Text.

    The second half of the year is about tackling some of the bigger issues. While we’ve been hard at work on smaller fixes, the editor focus has been building a new paradigm for content creation in WordPress. You can check out their progress on their GitHub project, Gutenberg.

    After the new editor launches, the customization focus will start looking at how we can expand on the patterns Gutenberg has established. We have a number of problems we’ll need to address: how do you tell if you’re editing content on one page, or on all of your pages? What if I want to show my latest news on my homepage, in addition to a welcome message and some information about the services my company offers? What if I want my phone number higher up on the page? How can I edit my website without knowing any code? What if I’m a developer building websites for others — how can I make it easier for my media clients to act on breaking news or updates and edit their sites on-the-fly as their situation dictates?

    All of these are problems people struggle with when building websites on WordPress today. We hope that with Gutenberg’s design patterns as a base, we can start tackling these thorny problems and help empower people to build websites to help promote themselves, their passions, and their work.

    Stay tuned for more updates.

    mel

    ,

  • Saying No

    Saying “No” however isn’t just healthy, it’s necessary. The path to success is paved in thousands of tiny No’s. Behind every inspired design is a graveyard of early iterations and averted feature creep. Only through stripping products down to their most essential elements can we focus on doing fewer things better.
    Great Question of the Week from Julie Zhuo’s The Looking Glass newsletter, in which Julie talks about when and how it’s appropriate to say “no.” I’m just catching up on my email from this past week’s WordCamp Europe / Community Summit trip to Paris, and this one caught my eye. If you’re a design professional, be sure to give it a read.

    mel