[wp-hackers] GSOC 2013: Project - New User Walkthrough

[Lasindu Charith]

Hi,

I'm Lasindu Charith, a Final Year student of Department of Computer Science
& Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. I'm quite happy to see
that Wordpress has been selected for GSOC this time, so that a lot of WP
lovers are given the opportunity to work on what they daily use.

After going through this list of ideas in the GSOC2013  page, I found this
project - New User Walkthrough to be quite interesting and merges with many
of my fields of interests. I have worked with WP for years and created
dozens of sites using WP. I have a good experience in working with PHP,
MySQL as well. But I certainly need to grasp better WP development
experience.

After reading the project idea as well as the previous GSOC project done on
the same area way back in 2010, I'm wondering why it is not used in WP. So
few of the concerns I had was,

[1] Seems like the requirements/ideas changed while the project moves on,
due to some usability issues.

[2] It would have been better if the users/webmasters are given
more flexibility in managing the module (to choose what should be the steps
in the walkthrough etc.)

May be Webmaster should be given the opportunity to pick the User
Walkthrough module to be included or not in the WP installation wizard and
may be this module should be configurable to be suited for different types
users from the WP backend.

This idea of introducing a Walkthrough module will be quite useful for a
newbie and  might not be as useful for a experienced user. So there should
be definitely a way to disable it. (My idea is to provide the option in the
installation wizard-may be with a simple checkbox and the option might be
altered from the WP back-end in case user finds it important or annoying. )

So I would like to know developers' thoughts as well, and any ideas of
where I can start off with. (May be some documentation, exercises, issues
where I can get a better hands-on experience towards the project. )

Thank You,

Lasindu