Alex King from Crowd Favorite has recently posted an article on something they’ve been working on together with the team — a better Admin UI for Post Formats. Alex talks about a plugin that adds a more intuitive and meaningful user interface to post formats in WordPress.
It’s basically a set of tabs added to the edit post screen in the admin panel and when switching between tabs, extra controls are added to the screen for more control over the specific post format.
Currently WP-Post-Formats supports standard posts, statuses, links, images, galleries, videos and quotes. Did they miss anything? Yup — asides, which nobody really understands yet except for Matt Mullenweg ;) Anyhow, we at Theme.fm decided to give the plugin a go and it turned out to be quite amazing!
Post formats themselves were inspired from Tumblr and now with this plugin the UI becomes more simple and user friendly. The only problem I see with Alex’s approach is the meta data storage. Take quotes for example. WP-Post-Formats gives two extra fields — source name and source URL, which apparently are stored in the meta fields for the current post.
Now the problem is that if the running WordPress theme does not take advantage of this post meta, they’re never seen anywhere, except the admin UI. Plus, if the plugin’s disabled for some reason, oh well! Of course it’s a lot easier keeping the source name and URL outside the post content, but why not squeeze it inside? Use extra HTML comments tags to outline the quote and some basic HTML markup between the tags. Like this:
<!--wp-post-formats: quote-start-->
<blockquote>
If you can't make it good, make it a least look good.
<cite><a href="#source-url">Bill Gates</a></cite>
</blockquote>
<!--wp-post-formats: quote-end-->
A comment to the quote can go somewhere here, maybe some extra links
or a short discussion about what has been said in the quote.
And parse it in and out each time it is loaded and getting the wp-post-formats comment behave like the more tag in WordPress. That way the quote is stored inside the post content, does not rely on the plugin or any other post meta data. Will work in every (good) WordPress theme and will show up in things like RSS feeds and XML-RPC requests without any extra work. I call that a little bit more native.
Also, changing the post title to the quote content is not the best idea. It’ll create duplicate wording in most WordPress themes, while omitting the title is fine, since the guidelines state that themes should display posts without titles as good as the rest.
Anyhow, as Alex points out, pull requests are more than welcome. The project is open source and hosted on GitHub so feel free to watch, fork and submit issues. We really love the current implementation and looking forward to see where it’ll be taken several months from now. Can this possible be an addition for WordPress 3.4? We’ll find out. Thanks for reading and staying tuned!
They have definitely got a STRONG start here! I’ve been playing around on VoodooPress. I agree about the meta data issue though. I already use my own named fields to do the same. Mostly because I threw it in real quick when formats first came out. I would definitely like to see a theme agnostic solution for using the extra data… otherwise it really would be a broken solution. But it is a great starting point for a feature that really should be considered for core. It would go a long way, IMHO, towards an easier UX for beginners. And it’s just plain handy. (And I use asides all the time darnit!)
Hey Rev, thanks for your comment! I scanned through your blog for asides and I did find some. I did find asides in Twenty Eleven too and Matt Mullenweg’s blog of course, but hey, how do those differ from simple posts without a title? What’s the real purpose of an aside post?
To answer that question we’ll have to date back to May 2005 and Matt’s post On Asides which suggests a totally different styling for asides — somewhere on the side on their own, a sort of replacement for a separate blog where Matt could post short entries but longer than status post, so basically it’s something in between. His new design however uses asides in the same way as you do, but again, is that really a post format? And how do Matt’s latest asides differ from link posts? ;)
I personally see asides deprecated a few years from now, at least as a post format. The rest make total sense though :) Here’s also a really old Codex entry for Adding Asides :) Anyways, just thinking out loud here and off-topic too, so yeah, we’re excited to see where Alex and the team can get with the new approach at post formats.