The Evil Bouncy Castle of Settings and Customize

[martin (Martin Brennan)]

Hi @LWinterberg , I know it’s been a while but your post here popped into my head again over the weekend and I thought it would be good to respond. I am the tech lead of an internal “Staff Experience” team which I run with @tobiaseigen (who is the Product Manager) and @ella (who is the Designer). Our mandate in this team is to reduce complexity with the admin section and make it easier to use for everyone.

I wanted to say, we hear you, and your post perfectly sums up the issues that we are trying to address. The bouncing around, the disparate documentation, and the huge range of settings that must be understood to change what you want are huge hurdles. Some of the things we have been working on to address this so far are:

1. Introducing filterable sidebar navigation for admins (see Introducing experimental admin sidebar navigation)

2. We’ve changed access control site settings to be group-based rather than trust-level based for greater control and simplicity (see Changes coming to settings for giving access to features (from trust levels to groups))

3. We are updating plugin UIs for consistency and making it so the site settings are right there along with the plugin so you don’t need to go hunting for them

   

4. We’ve made various improvements to site settings, like having new dedicated controls for things like file types and file size

   
   

And some things we are planning on for the future:

1. Further evolving admin sidebar filtering into a popup menu that searches the entire admin section, and can take you to a setting or a page based on fuzzy search
2. Creating more tightly-scoped “config areas” where many settings and other grouped UI elements are presented in the one place to set up important things (like for example branding, or the example in your OP, text customization and spam prevention), rather than having to bounce around to 1000 different places
3. Introducing a new admin dashboard to allow for better guided setup at different stages of the site’s lifecycle and an overhaul of our problem/messaging system for admins so it’s easier to see things that may need to be addressed in your site
4. Overhauling the theme installation and management UIs for simplicity and consistency
5. Further changes to existing site settings, removing or hiding ones which are seldom used or confusing, and so on

Feel free to continue giving feedback here in this topic, we are listening and trying our hardest to tame the admin beast!