Its a New year, and a new focus for shortcake. We met today on #feature-shortcode to catch up on feedback from the community summit and WordCampUS, as well as to chat about whats up next.
General feedback is that people are interested in what we’ve done, but there was some concern about how we’re storing data, as well as the general UI and how it is coupled with the media library and TinyMCE.
The technical limitations of the current Shortcode API are something we’ve run into. There have been a number of proposed solutions; from a new syntax, to storing structured data in post meta or as a custom post type. However the purpose of Shortcake has always been to make these decisions less critical. The biggest challenge for us right now is to come up with a really great interface and user experience.
For 2016, we’re decided to focus on creating a great way to manage complex blocks of content, implemented using shortcodes. We want to build an awesome interface, and get into a position for serious consideration for inclusion in WordPress core after the next release.
We’re also going to create a develop branch on github and work to refactor the codebase and ensure it’s well structured, all core-comparable and uncoupled from tinyMCE and the media modal. We’d like you to be able to use it in Calypso if you wanted.
We’ll be restarting weekly meetings on Mondays at 8pm GMT from next week.
Finally, Daniel and I have been sharing lead development, however I’ll be taking over as he has to focus on the REST API and WP-CLI as much as possible.
We’d love some help on the UI/UX side. We’re going to look into a way to reach out to current users to get feedback. We’ve also done a fair bit of research into how other platforms handle this.
If you’d be interested in doing wireframes, mockups, user research, or just have ideas of how the whole user experience and interface could work, we’d love to chat to you more. Reach out in slack (#feature-shortcode) any time, or join the meeting next week.
- Focus on building content blocks using Shortcodes and creating a great UI.
- Do a major refactor/rewrite of the codebase to ensure it is core compatible, well structured and as uncoupled and core compatible as possible.
- We’re going to target the next release alongside WP 4.5 so we can seriously be considered for inclusion in Core in 4.6.
- Weekly meetings to restart from Monday 11th Jan at 8pm GMT.