[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #38399: Twenty Seventeen: Improve front page "panels" to follow core best practices

[WordPress Trac]

#38399: Twenty Seventeen: Improve front page "panels" to follow core best practices
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 Reporter:  celloexpressions  |      Owner:
     Type:  defect (bug)      |     Status:  new
 Priority:  normal            |  Milestone:  4.7
Component:  Bundled Theme     |    Version:
 Severity:  normal            |   Keywords:  dev-feedback ux-feedback
  Focuses:                    |
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 Here's the start of what we'd need to do to make the current approach
 appropriate for a bundled theme in terms of the official customize API
 guidelines and ideal UX:

 - Remove the panel. Themes are strongly discouraged from using panels,
 especially when they're generic "theme options", and sections should
 always have multiple controls when possible. All of the controls in the
 panel belong in a single section.
 - Consider moving the layout control to a separate section, or if it stays
 in theme options, consider adding at least one other related option so we
 have multiple controls in this section. Or, remove this control entirely.
 It seems like the two-column layout is signature of this theme, so it
 seems a bit odd to have an option to turn it off.
 - If the layout control stays, it needs to update with postMessage, by
 toggling a body class.
 - Consider moving the front page content controls to the static front page
 section.
 - Replace the arbitrary number of panels with a dynamic approach. In the
 customizer, this could be done with a single dropdown-pages control (which
 will soon be able to create pages), and a minimal custom control in the
 theme that shows the selected items and allows them to be removed. This
 would be stored as an array of featured page ids, similar to the proposed
 core approach. For simplicity in the theme, reordering wouldn't be
 supported, but we'd get a lot of the UX ideas developed for core carried
 over.
 - Remove the borders around sections - they prevent users from seeing the
 design as it will be published.
 - Implement selective refresh for the front page content, which will bring
 visual edit icons as well.

 Once we get into it we'll likely have more issues come up, and some of
 those things can potentially be skipped, but this is a rough list of what
 we need to work through if it stays in the theme. We should not merge the
 theme into core with the current solution as-is because it violates the
 best practices with panels that we're trying really hard to encourage
 themes to follow.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/38399>
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