Suggests for improving tech instruction

[RanYanivHartstein]

2.5 introduced inline documentation in the administration areas - many options now have short descriptions.

However, some of these could be made superfluous if only the options they were documenting were properly explained in the first place.

For e.g., in the post edit page, the option for allowing pingbacks and trackbacks reads "Allow pings", and is followed by and explanation that reads "pings are trackbacks and pingbacks". Isn't it easier to just say "Allow trackbacks and pingbacks", and this way be more consistent with other mentions of these concepts elsewhere in the admin?

A more obvious example is in the link edit page. Options for setting the target value are just the meaningless "_blank", "_top" and "none", and these are followed by an explanation that reads "Essentially this means if you choose _blank your link will open in a new window" (i.e., "We confused you with too many options you don't care about, but this is how to get what you really want here"). I would suggest simply explaining what these options do - "_blank (new window/tab)", "_top (breaks out of frames), "none (same window)".

I suppose there are more examples, these are just a few that stood out.

[markjaquith]

Good points. Inline documentation is nice, not needing it is better.

[ninjaWR]

this sounds like something I can do

[RanYanivHartstein]

I opened a separate ticket #6615 that deals specifically with the link edit page issue. It includes a patch

[ninjaWR]

Patch takes care of some of the more obvious things... other than those, I didn't really see anything that I'd remove/change

[Otto42]

+1, I noticed the "Allow Pings" one today, and thought that it seemed a bit silly.

[ninjaWR]

possible for 2.6?

[RanYanivHartstein]

These are rather simple fixes, some related to #6615. Couldn't this be easily done in time for 2.7?

[santosj]

Replying to RanYanivHartstein:

These are rather simple fixes, some related to #6615. Couldn't this be easily done in time for 2.7?

Patch is most likely stale since it has been 3 months. Someone will need to update the patch and double check that the same areas need improvement.

[Otto42]

Refreshed patch for trunk

[Otto42]

Patch seems relevant to me. Attached refreshed patch for current trunk.

[jacobsantos]

Can this get into 2.7? Are there any suggestions that would be holding this ticket back from inclusion into core?

[ryan]

Stale patch. Removing has-patch.

[ninjaWR]

Think this as slowly been resolved over the 15 months in the various releases. I'll take a look later when I have time before closing it.

[ninjaWR]

Latest patch brings the trackback/pingback wording for pages to the same as for posts. Also gets rid of the wording about the jankyness of the page ordering.

[westi]

Patch has gone stale again :-(

If someone breaths some life into it soon I will commit.

[xenlab]

working on refreshing 6362.diff changes for trunk now

[xenlab]

Refreshing changes made in 6362.diff for trunk --> Doing one file at a time, but all will start with 6362.4* so that we know they are related.

[xenlab]

Page password protection was removed, eh?

[xenlab]

Refreshing changes made in 6362.diff for trunk. Description text was removed from this one. added it back in for consistency with wp-admin/edit-category-form.php

[xenlab]

New version of 6362.4.diff (found more changes that had been moved into wp-admin/includes/meta-boxes.php) ---> Original attachment comment: Refreshed the changes made in 6362.3.diff for latest trunk (applies to wp-admin/includes/meta-boxes.php instead of wp-admin/edit-page-form.php now)

[xenlab]

Refreshing changes made in 6362.diff for trunk. This one is for the edit-tag-form.php

[xenlab]

Found another example of a description for a common field that didn't have the text changed in the original patch. Attaching this for consistency's sake.

[xenlab]

More inconsistencies that original patch did not address.

[xenlab]

More inconsistencies that original patch did not address.

[xenlab]

Patch is refreshed. I also found some inconsistencies that original patches did not address, and have added them here.

Apply these diffs:

6362.4.diff
6362.4-category.diff
6362.4-link-category.diff
6362.4-tag.diff
6362.4-categories.diff
6362.4-link-categories.diff

[scribu]

Cross-referncing: #11177.

[westi]

Will review and commit tomorrow.

[xenlab]

Refreshed for 2.9-beta-1 r12212

[xenlab]

westi,

the patch has been updated for the latest in trunk. I've combined it in one file, which should make it easier to apply.

thanks for the commit!

• Eric Marden

[dd32]

<?php _e('Allow ') ?><a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Introduction_to_Blogging#Managing_Comments" target="_blank"><?php _e('trackbacks and pingbacks') ?></a><?php _e(' on this page.'); ?>

This is going to be better written as:

printf( __('Allow <a href="%s" target="_blank">trackbacks and pingbacks</a> on this page.'), 'http://codex.wordpress.org/Introduction_to_Blogging#Managing_Comments');

Not all languages follow the same sentence structure as english does.

[xenlab]

I can see how that would be a problem. I've updated the patch with your suggested change.

[xenlab]

Fixed i18n issue, and re-Refreshed for 2.9-beta-1 r12212

[xenlab]

Also if it was already entirely obvious, 6362.6-all.diff is the current patch to apply.

Thanks!

[westi]

I committed this in [12228].

I believe all these changes are in now.

[westi]

(In [12259]) Use _x() not _c(). See #6362 fixes #11228 props filosofo.