We wrote about feature pointers in WordPress earlier this week and one of the usage scenarios that came into my mind (except introducing new core features after WordPress upgrades) is tours, which is why we created this yet another experiment.
First we thought of theme options panel tours (for those complex premium themes), then we thought of plugin tours upon plugin activation and finally we thought of a more general WordPress tour.
WordPress has evolved a lot throughout the years and saying that WordPress is incredibly easy to use is not fair. Things like custom post types, custom taxonomies, permalinks structures, child themes, shortcodes, page templates, custom fields and other things could be quite confusing, especially to newcomers.
We thought it would be nice to create an admin tour, so we did! We created a simple plugin that uses the new Admin Pointers feature, currently in the roadmap for WordPress 3.3. The code is dirty, uncommented and poorly written, and the admin pointers API is going to change before the release so we’re not sharing the source code just yet ;) Here’s some feedback that we already got:
@kovshenin that looks unreal, wow!
@EmilUzelac
Awesome! RT @kovshenin: @tdh Here we go :) http://t.co/lpKKBkye
@tdh
@themefm I think #WordPress pointers will be great for giving tips to clients.
@AaronTweeton
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That looks very cool, and lots of uses spring to mind.
I know it is early days but a couple of quick questions.
1. Is it easy jump to another page and continue the tour?
2. Can a tour be easily started again (say from a link on a Plugin/theme options page) if it had been viewed once already (partially or completed)?
David it’s quite early to tell since the API is being changed and improved until the actual release. But from what I can tell yes, but for a very detail tour with multiple pages you’ll need a lot of planning. The rest is up to javascript and saving/restoring state, showing the correct pointers on the pages, etc. What we did is quite simple, it’s just a sequence of pointers where one shows after the other has hit the “Continue” button :)
As for the second question sure, tours can be started over but for a better user experience pointers themselves should be triggered by the user, not fly out like pop-up ads ;)
Thanks for your comment!
This Tour will be great to explain to your clients how to use their websites. Its very visual.
Yeah Sergio, that’s definitely one of the usage scenarios! Thanks for your comment :)
Super awesome stuff! Is it safe for now to use the code =as appears in your tutorial?
For example, can I use it right now in my plugin or is it better to wait for the stable version?
Thanks!
M
Since 3.3 is out, can you release the code you used?
would be nice to post up the source ;)