Brief Intro

This is in relation to Design Tweaks: Who’s In? (An idea in three acts) for anyone who stumbles in here from Google or the like. And thanks to the WP peeps for giving us a chance to share some ideas.

Isn’t this just Fluency?

Yes, and no, on the whole it is quite Fluency-like, but I’ve retained the icons for the menu items, as well as the collapse function - both of which I have removed/disabled in the current version of Fluency.

Reasoning

Having a menu structure that is distinctly separate from the ‘content’ portion of the page makes sense to me, which is why I liked the old “Tiger Admin plugin”, and is why I created Fluency. I also believe that the menu feel much more at home when its down the left, and was quite happy when that change was initially made to the WP core.

I don’t hate the current menu functionality, I’m just lazy, with a preference for consistent behaviour. My issue with the current WP menus is that when expanded the process to get to, for example, “add new page” is ‘hover’ over “pages” menu to reveal arrow, ‘click’ arrow to display the submenu, then click “add new”. When contracted, the process is ‘hover’ over “pages” icon, then click “add new”. Why can’t these both be the same? The hover menus used in Fluency would provide the same menu navigation experience whether the menus are expanded or contracted.

The Mockup - Expanded Menu

Click image to open full-size version in new window.

I resisted changing anything in the content area of the page, I’ve only played around with the surroundings. Mockup shows example of submenu (show on hover), and ‘current page’ indicator on “Dashboard”.

The Mockup - Collapsed Menu

Click image to open full-size version in new window.

Example of what the menu may look like in its collapsed form, again with submenu example and ‘current page’ indicator.

The Alternatives

The significant contrast in colours between menu and navigation may be too much for some, below are two alternative version with different shades of grey. The first using the ‘standard WordPress grey’ of #464646, and the second using #CCC. Personally I think the menu area in the second one is too light and blends in a little too much.

Click image to open full-size version in new window.

Click image to open full-size version in new window.

Conclusion

These are only relatively quick mockups, mainly because I lost a bunch of work when Fireworks crashed when I hit the save button, and I had to redo almost everything (not impressed), but also because of the tight deadline for suggestions. There are a number of small things I’d probably still fiddle around with if given the chance (and if I had time). With Fluency I didn’t really change the content styles very much at all, with the exception of some fonts (sans-serif instead of serif), link colours and button treatments.

The 2.8 release sounds like its pretty “soon”, so I don’t know whether changes as significant as these would be doable in that timeframe, allowing for appropriate browser testing, user testing etc. If major changes had to be held back until WP2.9 I would have no issue what-so-ever with that.

Ok, I’ll stop writing now.