[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #38426: Twenty Seventeen: Improve user and developer experience with the customizer integration

[WordPress Trac]

#38426: Twenty Seventeen: Improve user and developer experience with the customizer
integration
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 Reporter:  celloexpressions                     |       Owner:
     Type:  defect (bug)                         |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal                               |   Milestone:  4.7
Component:  Bundled Theme                        |     Version:  trunk
 Severity:  normal                               |  Resolution:
 Keywords:  has-patch dev-feedback needs-        |     Focuses:  ui
  testing ui-feedback ux-feedback                |
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Comment (by celloexpressions):

 Replying to [comment:12 davidakennedy]:
 > Replying to [comment:10 celloexpressions]:
 >
 > Thanks for the thoughtful response and the continued contributions to
 Twenty Seventeen. I hear everything you're saying, and every time I work
 with theme customization, I see room for improvement too. But as we're
 close to beta, I want to focus in on what needs to and can be done for
 4.7. And some of these larger issues are out of scope for the theme to
 handle.
 >
 > The reality is there are a number of outstanding tickets for the theme,
 and this is something we need to get pinned down and patched before beta.
 Let's draw out what we can bring in, rather than focus what we need to
 have improve in core, then spin a patch from that.

 Agreed. That's why we need to stick to the existing core conventions and
 written best practices with Twenty Seventeen for now. We don't have time
 to go down the rabbit hole of grouping options that are theme-specific, or
 reducing the number of core top-level sections, in the theme. And really,
 themes shouldn't need to worry about this; these should be addressed on
 the core side in a future release. For Twenty Seventeen, both theme-added
 sections are contextual, so when they are visible it'll almost always be
 one at a time. If you have a sidebar you'll never see the layout section
 unless child themes or plugins add additional options to it.

 In past user testing, I've noticed that users tend to click around to the
 different sections to see what the options do. If that behavior holds, the
 front page sections should still be discoverable, and showing the borders
 when the section is open would continue to provide that UX benefit of
 showing where each section is. If that doesn't work we may be able to
 leverage the preview/edit toggle concept added with #27403, but let's try
 it, user test it, and iterate as needed during beta.

 [attachment:38426.2.diff]:
 - Refresh [attachment:38426.diff] for the directory structure change.
 - Update for [38906], allowing pages to be created directly to be used as
 front page sections. It's a bit repetitive, so we could do something like
 only showing them on the last option, but for new sites/users this will be
 incredibly useful.
 - Restore the panel borders, but only shown them when editing the front
 page sections (along with the placeholders for empty panels). This also
 makes the panel placeholders look like placeholders again. I tried adding
 back the needed CSS based on the updated structure with selective refresh,
 but if it's missing pieces we still need let's add those back in. This
 part of the patch is fairly involved and I think there were some things
 leftover from other themes, so I'm not entirely sure what the
 expected/current behavior should be when the other changes are taken into
 account. The patch feels close.
 - Ensure that front page panels borders don't prevent panel contents from
 being interacted with, by setting a negative z-index. Likely also fixes a
 conflict in styling with #27403.

 I'm planning on running and recording some user tests for Twenty Seventeen
 and the customizer on Thursday, and by then we'll probably also have
 visible edit icons (#27403), which will really turn the whole experience
 upside down. So let's see how it goes with [attachment:38426.2.diff]. Let
 me know if you have any specific objections to this revised patch;
 probably the most important part for me is correcting the section
 structure (naming can be iterated on) and removing the unnecessary panel,
 followed by selective refresh support for the front page panels.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/38426#comment:13>
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