Introducing experimental admin sidebar navigation

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41

It did make it into the admin sidebar for a beat, but it unfortunately had to be reverted as it caused a couple of issues. But I think it should be back again soon. :crossed_fingers:

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42

Well, I hated this initially, but its coming on nicely now.

I really like how it changes the menu to a dedicated Admin menu.

I have two reasons to prefer this:

  • It plays nice with my muscle memory for bringing up the Admin menu in the first place - the link is now in the same place.
  • It resolves the issue (to a large extent) of there just simply being too much stuff.

For me this nested approach is way better.

Note I’m using the menu as a Header Dropdown (:+1: )

The only issues I have found:

  • No upgrade link
  • “Back to forum” doesn’t respect your homepage setting?
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43

Great! Glad you have come to like the new admin sidebar. :sunflower:

Same!

This might be about to change, now that we are considering moving more to the sidebar like the subsections for settings, users and badges. But we are now also looking at adding a search filter at the top of the admin sidebar to make it easier to drill down to find what you need.

And we’re looking at a bigger restructuring of the admin section which should hopefully make it more intuitive to find what you need to configure your site and manage your community. We’ll be starting another topic to discuss that at some point soon.

This is a known issue - we will be getting that back soon.

Ah. @martin this appears to be a bug. The link seems to go straight to /latest instead of to /. I think it should work the same as clicking the site logo/title.

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44

Ah yes my bad, I hardcoded this to latest, will fix it to respect prefs:

I have been away a couple of days this week and buried by many other things that have popped up in my absence. Hopefully I can get to these little fixes next week :crossed_fingers:

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45

With this pair of commits this should finally be resolved; it was more of an architecture problem with how the sidebar initial state was loaded:

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46

This is starting to really shape up! Thank you for the improvements.

I’m seeing the real benefit of this on the mobile form factor especially.

I guess the only slightly unintuitive thing is the way the drop-down menu changes scope, which is unusual UX behaviour? … but I still like it, it’s far better than having everything on the menu at once and it’s quick to get used to this.

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Please change one of these. I keep hitting the email settings when I want to go to the regular settings

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49

New bug here!

image

This gets ever longer the more you open the menu! :sweat_smile:

The only workaround is to refresh the web page

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50

Well…we really want you to know about all our fine plugins! I will work on a fix for this hopefully today :slight_smile:

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51

I merged a couple of fixes today for outstanding problems:

And this one a few days ago:

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52

many thanks, looks like my issue is resolved :rocket:

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53

If you’ve been using the new admin sidebar and keeping up with software updates, you will have seen some cool new additions since we first started work on it in December 2023. It is our intention to make this the new default soon on new sites and eventually for everyone, so your testing, bug reports and ideas are most welcome!

Here is what the sidebar looks like now:

Screenshot 2024-03-27 at 9.04.39 AM
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New items to note:

  1. button to expand all/collapse all sections
  2. collapse status is remembered when you return to the admin section
  3. search filter to quickly find sidebar items by name
  4. sidebar sections reflect emerging new admin section structure

We are currently also working on improving and standardizing navigation elements on admin pages beyond the admin sidebar itself. This is a work in progress so expect to see quite a bit of inconsistency right now. The goal is to give each page a title, crumbtrail to help with orientation/navigation, and a sub-navigation menu to access related pages.

In addition, each plugin will get a new page that contains a menu to access settings and other sub-pages related to the plugin. We are starting with AI which currently looks like the below but will get more sub-pages. Once we have figured it out with AI we will apply that styling to all plugins.

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More admin pages will get similar treatment. For instance, if you access “What’s New” and “Reports” directly from the sidebar now you can see them on their own page, not as tabs on the admin landing page.

The new navigation structure is not set in stone - we are exploring ways to simplify it further by moving some items that are not accessed so often deeper into the structure, and then providing various useful ways to get to them, e.g. via keyword search, section landing pages with information on what you might want to do in the section, and links directly from the admin landing page.

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54

Love the filter :sparkles:

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55

When I use the sidebar on my tablet, I sometimes tap the item next to the one I wanted to tap. So then I use the one I wanted to use, but somehow the filter is not applied. For example, I first clicked ‘search’ and then ‘experimental’, and this is the result:

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And I still don’t like that some sidebar sections, which apply a filter instead of using a category, show different settings depending on my locale. The experimental button in the sidebar returns all experimental site settings when your locale is English, but in German, you only get the ones which contain ‘experimental’ in the setting’s name and those which are not translated. The latter are the reason why using the German term also wouldn’t show all. [1] I expected to see all experimental settings when I use that section of the sidebar. What bothers me most is that it is not obvious that clicking the same button on the sidebar will show different settings depending on the language you choose as a user.

I’m also confused when I click ‘font’ and settings like ‘delete user self max post count’ appear.

  1. Something like ‘experiment’ would work to find those with a German translation and those without. However, I think there are languages where this workaround wouldn’t work. ↩︎

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56

This is actually a bug, thanks for pointing this out, we will get it fixed.

This is a good point – we should move these into their own dedicated category.

Yes this is because we have fuzzy searching for site settings; I agree it’s quite confusing though when you click on a sidebar link and see things that aren’t an exact match. This needs some more refinement.

cc @tobiaseigen for all this context

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57

For filtering, you have to know the name of what you are looking for. For the things I don’t use regularly, I often don’t know the name.

Are those translatable? I have the impression they are not. When I change my locale to English and filter for ‘user’, I get four results. One of them does not contain the word user. When I change my locale back to German, I can find three results filtering for ‘Benutzer’. To find the one with the keyword, I’d still have to use ‘user’.

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Maybe keywords could change what I wrote above, but at the moment they are not helpful for me.

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58

For this example, we haven’t actually added keywords to any links except “Installed Plugins”, which gets all of your installed plugin names (which are not translated) as keywords. Do you have any plugins with “user” in the name?

All of the sidebar links which we filter on now are translateable. We do need to keep this in mind when adding additional keywords for the sidebar search – we did this when we added keywords for site setting search (which are also not widely used as yet). cc @kris.kotlarek so you are aware

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59

User notes

But some of the plugin names are translated in the interface e.g. solved, templates, assign… When the plugin in my list is shown as ‘Vorlagen’ I’d not filter for ‘templates’ to find it.

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60

Ah yes I see – I know it’s not that helpful, but this is because we have a weird mix of translated and untranslated plugins. Some plugins have their own category for their settings, which can be translated, and we use this for the name in the list:

And some (like User Notes) do not have this, and we just have to fall back to the raw plugin name:

Perhaps we just need a really explicit translation key, something like admin.plugin_name, that can be filled in for all plugins and then translated. I think that will provide more solid ground for the future and allow us to remove these strange hacks and fallbacks eventually.

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61

We just updated the sidebar filter last week to have two additional links when “No results” are found:

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  • “Search site settings” - Navigates to the site settings page with the filter prefilled in the search
  • “Admin user list” - Navigates to the user list with the filter prefilled in the username search

This should help bridge the gap until we get a better “admin-wide” search.

This is also done now, but we still haven’t added a lot of additional keywords.

6 Likes