[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #50416: 5.5 About Page

[WordPress Trac]

#50416: 5.5 About Page
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 Reporter:  davidbaumwald            |       Owner:  marybaum
     Type:  task (blessed)           |      Status:  assigned
 Priority:  normal                   |   Milestone:  5.5
Component:  Help/About               |     Version:
 Severity:  normal                   |  Resolution:
 Keywords:  needs-copy-review        |     Focuses:  ui, accessibility,
  needs-design-feedback              |  administration, ui-copy
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Comment (by desrosj):

 First, here is a link to the latest document that is being used:
 https://docs.google.com/document/d/12Ag6CHVRIsX0DuGeQD9eniZCLJSNf_7rJamZfmxgZoI/edit?usp=sharing.
 The one above was not publicly available.

 Overall, great work on this page so far! For me, reads very, very long and
 feels pretty wordy.

 I went back and looked at a handful of the last releases for perspective
 and to confirm that it was a lot longer than usual. Here are some numbers
 that I found since (and including) 5.0:

 - An average of ~3430 characters.
 - An average of ~40 sentences.
 - An average of ~549 words.

 Before suggestions were made, the current draft has:
 - 5243 characters.
 - 106 sentences.
 - 947 words.

 With this context in mind, the current draft is roughly double the average
 size of the About page from the last 5 releases. I totally acknowledge
 that this release has ''a lot'' of great things to call out, so understand
 it's hard to get close to these averages, but I think those are great
 numbers to keep in mind as we trim the current draft down and refine. A
 user should be able to quickly gloss over the About page and be informed
 about the features that were just installed with the update.

 With this in mind, I went through and made a large number of suggestions.
 I'll briefly summarize them here to illustrate my thinking.

 First, the developer section was missing a large number of changes that
 landed later in the release cycle. I updated the list and suggested the
 following tickets be added to the Developer section as large call outs
 (ones that I do not feel strongly about having their own call out section
 have an *****):
 - Defining environment types (#33161)
 - Server-side registered blocks in the REST API (#50263)
 - Passing data to template files (#21676)
 - Dashicons (#49913)*****

 Everything else was either removed, suggested to be removed, or shuffled
 down into the bulleted list with a shorter one sentence description.

 If I were quickly skimming the page, it is not clear for some sections
 what exactly the new feature is. This was mainly true in the Security
 section. Without reading the entire section, you would not know that
 enabling auto-updates was now available. I made some suggestions to
 shorten that section, and I also feel fairly strongly that being able to
 update plugins/themes by uploading a ZIP file  (#9757) should also be
 called out somewhere on this page (another late addition). I decided to
 suggest it be added to the Security section because it's related to
 keeping your site up to date, and also plugin/theme based.

 The block editor was missing some big callouts. Mainly, the block
 directory. I added a suggestion for that section. I also suggested that
 "content templates" be replaced with the correct name, "block patterns" in
 the block pattern section and to also call out that Core has several
 default patterns, but plugin and theme authors will be adding their own.

 The a11y section needs a bit of refinement. The current copy suggests that
 accessibility needs only correlate with age or injury, but that's not
 necessarily true.

 And lastly, "Gutenberg" should be avoided whenever possible. "Block
 editor" is always the preferred way to refer to the editor in the context
 of Core. The only exception is if the plugin is being referenced, like
 this sentence on the 5.4 About page:

 > Of course, if you want to work with the very latest tools and features,
 install the Gutenberg plugin. You’ll get to be the first to use new and
 exciting features in the block editor, before anyone else has seen them!

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/50416#comment:41>
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