[wp-hackers] has anyone looked at making Edit panels 'simpler'for novices?

[Robert Deaton]

On 6/29/06, Justin Moore <wantmoore at gmail.com> wrote:
> The fact that the status/location of the options boxes is cookie-based
> has been driving me batty. I know I'm not the only person who blogs
> from more than one machine, and having to reposition those to my
> tastes on each PC is rather annoying. Users who don't know about
> cookies and database tables and all that geeky stuff that we take for
> granted would probably see this is a bug when they login from a second
> (or third) computer: "Oh, WP forgot where I had my boxes."

Agreed, this has bothered me from some time.

Actually, to expand, the whole dragging collapsing boxes as a concept
altogether is annoying to me. To me, its a bandaid fix for a poorly
designed UI. Not saying that I can do better (so please, not another
one of those, where's the patch then e-mails, Matt), but I surely
would've thought the Shuttle team would've made some changes to fix
all of that, since the boxes once expanded are ugly as can be. But
then again, I guess Shuttle was always a "beautification" which means
nothing to having a UI that makes sense.

One idea that I wouldn't mind, and might be a great way of working
this all out, is doing a WP Widget's style "Customize" page, where for
the right hand side instead of those boxes which take up an awful lot
of screen real-estate in their closed state, we just have the actual
form titles and input fields and such as necessary, dragged and
dropped and rearranged so that the write page itself is always the
same and doesn't have any unnecessary drag and drop nonsense. This
also solves the cookie issue, and with a little work or a plugin API
could be used to set up the default styles for the post screen.

-- 
--Robert Deaton