Bonus: Geeking Out  ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Critique Requires Participation** - Open-source projects invite critique but require tact because contributors volunteered the decisions. - Criticizing WordPress decisions carries extra responsibility since you can potentially contribute solutions. Transcript: Luke Jonathan, this is right on the back of our previous episode. And suddenly we find ourselves talking between us about various different things like geeking out on individual new blocks and getting into the weeds and specifics. Also, didn't get a chance to talk about the weeds and specifics of notes. So I just thought maybe we do a little extra episode. Maybe this is the next episode that we release, or maybe this is a bonus episode. See what happens. How do you feel? Let's do it. All right. So you're saying something about in the in-between episode time, you were saying something about's doesn't seem to be any coverage of people geeking out let me reframe it let me reframe Jonathan It all right so as i was listening to you i had only been able to play a few minutes with the 6.9 release and you were starting to talk about the like the typography the font variants of i wasn't Quite tracking it like i needed to have actually play with it a bit more to better understand. That could be my fault. But what I appreciated was your enthusiasm for it. And it reminded me of some of the things that, like when I read, you know, sometime after the new Apple updates, like John Gruber will do detailed analysis of it it's a very geeky now or He'll reference someone else doing a really detailed breakdown of like a new typography choice or a skewering of a font choice or um like um just recently he did a coverage of um a new like Logo in an app right and like how terrible it was and obviously apple is a much bigger ecosystem but it just struck me that, there's no lack of enthusiasm and passion for such things within The WordPress space. And as I was listening to you, I was like, I wonder who else is like geeking out about things and talking about it outside of the people making it. Luke Look, I'm sure it exists. However, it's a little bit different because while it's very easy to criticize some decisions that were made behind closed doors where you had no opportunity to influence them, you Can criticize that all you want, right? But it requires a little more finesse in approach if you're criticizing an open source project. Right, right. ([Time 0:00:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4966eeda-3dfa-4793-97ab-a4c77e7d95c4)) - **Contribute Instead Of Only Criticizing** - If you notice a problem in WordPress, consider contributing directly instead of only writing about it. - Showing up with specific recommendations increases the chance your input influences the project. Transcript: Luke So I want to talk to somebody about, or I want to read, I haven't been able to find it, the GitHub discussion, the track ticket where somebody ended up deciding that notes should be based On comments. And I want to understand the reasons why, because it introduces a lot of complications down the road for notes, right? It makes them much more difficult to work with outside of Gutenberg. And maybe that's fine because maybe the whole WordPress interface is going to block first, you know like going to a javascript but i can't just write about that and criticize it because Jonathan I could have shown up i could have shown up and had that discussion that's such an interesting point because you could write about it but there's almost this extra burden of like if you're Going to put the energy into writing about it, why not actually like contribute? And then I wonder, and why not that? And part of it is like when people talk about Apple or other closed ecosystems, there's little that they can do except perhaps hope to influence it by what they say or do. Whereas in WordPress, if you were to do such a thing, there's a very real chance that you would, in fact, have some influence, especially if it was carefully thought out and ideas where You made some specific recommendations. But is it that that's just a lot more effort? Luke Yeah, maybe for some people that that is it. Maybe they or maybe the people who do criticize what's been included in core and what hasn't i'm just go to r slash wordpress don't have much of a technical background and so they don't Feel like they can contribute although let me tell you there's plenty of needs design tagged tickets on the gutenberg repo if you have an interest in outside of the technical things To do some design work, or at least give an opinion on how something should work. ([Time 0:02:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a623bcb2-1bba-4979-ab2f-3037734d1553)) - **Hands-On With Notes Feature** - Luke tried working with Notes and found them to feel like a 'big boy' feature signaling maturity for WordPress. - He expected Notes to appear across admin screens and predicted notifications, tagging, and list-table indicators would follow. Transcript: Luke I'll go ahead. Jonathan Well, I was just going to say with notes, I think this was a good example. You referenced a technical detail, which is like how it's stored. And based on what you're telling me, it sounds like it's stored as comments, right? And what strikes me there is like at some point someone had to make a decision about it and maybe several things were weighed and it could have come just, it could have just come down to, Well, this is what this person knows, or this is all the time that there is available. It could have been much, it could have been really carefully thought out. And there's a really, you know, carefully considered set of decisions. And this is why it was done. But I think in open source and with volunteers, both can equally be true. And that truth can have a lot of ramifications in a project of this scale. Luke Yeah. In this case, I don't know the factors that were involved in making the decision. So don't think that I'm saying that it was the wrong decision. I'm not saying that. It very well may have been the very best possible decision. I'm just saying I've tried working with notes and I'm running into a lot of frustrations because their comments. Yep. So one of the things I noticed about notes is I feel like I said this on a, on a previous episode, they feel like a big boy feature. They feel like a grownup. All right. WordPress is starting to get serious now sort of thing. And so I expected to see notes both in the block editor, but also in other parts of the admin. At some point, we are going to have notifications. Hopefully in 7.0, it's slated for, we're going to have notifications when somebody replies to a note. At some point, we're going to be having tagging. That's a whole thing. I understand why that was not included in this release because it's a whole technical hurdle to be able to notify people about updates to their notes, right? But at some point, that's going to happen, point soon. And so it makes all the sense in the world to me to have the amount of notes on a post included in the list table. When you're looking through all of your posts, you should see this has got four comments and this has six notes. And just in the same way WordPress shows like a separate sort of style for pending comments, this post has three pending comments that haven't yet been approved. There should also be some sort of indication that there are unread notes or even that there are notes that mention you, maybe something like that. There should be some indication in the interface. How are you going to know that there are notes waiting for you in the post? Well, there could be a number of ways. Email is not going to be the only way, but it makes sense to have that outside of the actual post. Jonathan Does that make sense? It does. This is prompting a few things. First, with notes, notes can be used solo. And they are suggesting a collaborative and we know the collaboration has been one of the goals of the project for some time. Right. But this is making me think I'm curious how often people are using WordPress solo versus collaboratively. I've actually, I assume that it's a pretty high percentage of, in terms of active WordPress installs that actually would in fact have multiple people in it. So to me, some of the things that you're hitting on, it's going to be interesting to see how we in practice move WordPress from being pretty solidly historically, even though it's being Used like collaboratively in different ways, being as a I'd understand as like a solo from a solo workflow like one person's working in at a time like that used to be a thing back then right Of like making sure you weren't logged in at the same time and then we started to have like post locking and some of those early things that began to acknowledge this reality of multiple People working in it now we're moving more squarely into that and it makes me wonder is there a future state where i'm turning on or off like solo versus like ([Time 0:07:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d04efc6f-afa5-4e9f-bde9-a751203a8ca0)) - **Notes Signal Collaborative Shift** - Notes imply a shift toward collaborative workflows in WordPress and need UI surface beyond the editor. - Features like notifications, mentions, and list indicators are logical extensions for collaboration. Transcript: Luke At some point, we are going to have notifications. Hopefully in 7.0, it's slated for, we're going to have notifications when somebody replies to a note. At some point, we're going to be having tagging. That's a whole thing. I understand why that was not included in this release because it's a whole technical hurdle to be able to notify people about updates to their notes, right? But at some point, that's going to happen, point soon. And so it makes all the sense in the world to me to have the amount of notes on a post included in the list table. When you're looking through all of your posts, you should see this has got four comments and this has six notes. And just in the same way WordPress shows like a separate sort of style for pending comments, this post has three pending comments that haven't yet been approved. There should also be some sort of indication that there are unread notes or even that there are notes that mention you, maybe something like that. There should be some indication in the interface. How are you going to know that there are notes waiting for you in the post? Well, there could be a number of ways. Email is not going to be the only way, but it makes sense to have that outside of the actual post. Jonathan Does that make sense? ([Time 0:08:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/76c01c8c-2a20-4566-84df-8ba9e0cc2e96)) - **Solo Versus Collaborative Modes** - Moving WordPress from solo to collaborative use changes UX expectations like notification controls and mode toggles. - Some users may want solo mode to avoid noise while others need collaborative alerts and mentions. Transcript: Jonathan Right. But this is making me think I'm curious how often people are using WordPress solo versus collaboratively. I've actually, I assume that it's a pretty high percentage of, in terms of active WordPress installs that actually would in fact have multiple people in it. So to me, some of the things that you're hitting on, it's going to be interesting to see how we in practice move WordPress from being pretty solidly historically, even though it's being Used like collaboratively in different ways, being as a I'd understand as like a solo from a solo workflow like one person's working in at a time like that used to be a thing back then right Of like making sure you weren't logged in at the same time and then we started to have like post locking and some of those early things that began to acknowledge this reality of multiple People working in it now we're moving more squarely into that and it makes me wonder is there a future state where i'm turning on or off like solo versus like collaborative mode and with That because if it's just me i don't care if i get notifications about notes because it's me doing it yeah yeah by the way with post locking i don't know how post locking currently works Luke If you're editing a post and somebody tries to update it via maybe the REST API or WPCLI. Jonathan Or abilities API. Luke And then with the abilities API guarantee that somebody will try to update a post while you're editing it. And then your edits will overwrite. Yeah, that's going to happen. ([Time 0:10:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a2117bc8-07d3-4d36-bb41-9c397fab904e)) - **Update APIs Before UI Changes** - When integrating Notes into admin screens, respect post-type support checks and avoid confusing UI with identical icons. - Update post-type support APIs to clearly indicate editor sub-features like Notes before changing list tables. Transcript: Luke And well, right now in WordPress, if you have a look at your posts list, there is no column with the header comments. For some reason, we chose to use an icon instead of the word comments. So we do have a column for comments, but the word comments doesn't exist there. And the icon is a speech bubble, which is the same as the icon we use for notes in the block. Oh, interesting. Jonathan Okay. Luke So that's like a minor point of potential confusion there. Like maybe people can confuse notes and comments. To be fair, the little tag on the speech bubble is pointing in the opposite direction, but I'm not sure that's going to make too much of a difference. Anyway, and so then we need a change. In my pull request, in my, what's it called in SVN? Diff, I changed the column header to comments and added another column for notes and then ran into all sorts of problems because there's no documentation yet on how to check whether A post supports notes or not. Interesting. There's some like workarounds there. And then we do have a handy like PHP function in WordPress that checks whether a post has a particular thing enabled for it, like post type supports is the name of the function, but it can't Check sub features at the moment. So I had to then go and edit this post type supports function to enable whether if the editor is supported, then does it support this sub feature of the editor, which is notes. And then we store our post type supports in like a complicated format where sometimes it's just a true or false. Sometimes it's an array. Sometimes it's an array of arrays. Anyway, it's like a whole mess. And I tried to sort some of that out in Shrek. ([Time 0:12:27](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7eda286f-4128-46f0-886b-3ae5fd0691bc))