On bringing the Ollie Menu Designer to Core

He said he’s meeting with core committers soon to discuss possible contributor pathways that would allow rapid builders like himself to “hand off” their prototypes to seasoned contributors who could then navigate the processes required to bring new features into core.

From the Repository’s post on Ollie’s Menu Designer Lands on WordPress.org, Praised as “Game Changer”

I wanted to share some thoughts after being one of the people who chatted with Mike today. To zoom out a bit, Mike is an interesting type of contributor that I think reflects an untapped source of inspiration and feedback. His work with the Ollie Theme, Ollie Pro, and now the Ollie Menu Designer reflects both the power of embracing the Site Editor and solving real world problems that exist within the Site Editor today. It reminds me of WordPress YouTubers, like Tyler Moore, who dedicate their time to teaching people how to use the Site Editor—and the sheer volume of feedback and questions they receive from those following along. When running the FSE Outreach Program, these were important sources of broader feedback for me to tap into, alongside agencies, hosting companies, themers, enterprise customers, etc.

The navigation block has long been a pain point since we started pursuing it at the beginning of the Site Editor both in terms of usability and customization. I’m beyond thrilled to see movement here and real solutions being thrown out into the open for all to benefit from, especially around mega menus. For context, two years ago I did a deep dive into how agencies built mega menus with the navigation block limitations but no one wanted to share what they built publicly as it involved client work. This made navigating reporting on feedback tricky along with sharing what solutions folks had come up with to better inform Core. If you find yourself in this situation, I urge you to find ways to still comment on relevant GitHub issues with feedback and try to make the ask of the client to share more publicly what was done. It all greatly increases our chances of intelligently solving these problems.

With the FSE Outreach Program morphing into a general Outreach space, we’ve lost a bit of those targeted conversations and explorations that ended up happening around the Site Editor. It’s mainly become a place for folks to share recent tutorials/updates/opportunities for feedback and a place to ask questions about how best to adopt something in WordPress. These are both great purposes and match the intended change! In reflecting on the call this morning though, I’d love to see the Outreach channel also have space for this kind of active experimentation and contribution for builders who are all likely solving similar pain points in different ways. Those of us who then are core contributors and/or sponsored could help shepherd these ideas forward and connect them to the right places and people. On the call this morning, we talked about potentially having a dedicated space to share prototypes too (expect a proper Make post about that), especially for those who don’t want to go through launching a plugin or getting an experiment added in Gutenberg, and ways we can utilize WordPress Playground to make it easier to then have folks explore and react to what’s shared there. With AI rapidly increasing prototyping too, there’s a need for a more experimental, low lift space to pull inspiration and solutions from.

Embracing a prototyping space would offer a new pathway, alongside directly contributing PRs, pursuing a canonical plugin, contributing to a feature plugin, etc. The main friction to contribute something there is that it needs to be a workable prototype showing an idea or solution. The benefits would be that you’d forgo the learning curve of more direct contribution and instead broader contributors could vet ideas to see what to consider. The biggest downside to this is that we ultimately want and need more solid contributors bringing solutions into Core for both design and development. The bottle neck of a core committer reviewing and implementing the idea remains as Mike isn’t in a space to see it all the way through. Perhaps this is a pathway to bigger contributions that folks can walk and I still think it’s worth trying. I dance across realism and optimism so I’d rather we explore ways of embracing the reality of how more people might meaningfully contribute than stubbornly hold out for the few that make it to opening a PR in Gutenberg’s repo or trac. You truly never know how a new pathway might lead to someone getting more involved and the FSE Outreach Program is an example of how we can take new approaches within WordPress. My hope is that offering a new path means we’ll see more folks open up to share their solutions that are grounded in real world usage. At the same time, we can continue to work on growing contributors overall. I’d be remiss not to mention New Block additions for the Block Library as an area ripe for this kind of “handing off” solutions to contributors as we’ve already seen happening with WordPress 6.9 with blocks like the Icon block. Not everyone can get their hands dirty in contribution in the same way.

To bring it back to the practical and immediate over the broader system, where does this leave the Ollie Menu Designer plugin? I’m waiting for Mike to confirm what he’s comfortable contributing back (I love to be explicit and have true consent!). From there, there are some developers within Automattic who are in a spot to pursue shepherding it into Core (it helps to have some dedicated, sponsored help here). The first step will be to have those developers do the work to figure out whether what we can bring from the plugin complements or conflicts with some of the prior art we have on the approach in Ability to customise Navigation block “mobile” overlay. From there, I imagine we’ll need some design help to review the current approach and, when it’s in a solid state, it can be added to the Gutenberg plugin as an Experiment for greater exposure and user testing. Ideally, we can also do a dedicated call for testing on the Make Test site for even more awareness and feedback. Stay tuned.