Remove the admin menu auto-fold feature & move responsive viewport trigger to 960px.

[joedolson]

Since slightly before the dawn of time (definitely before r20749, but hard to pin down exactly when), the admin menu has automatically collapsed to a reduced width icon-only display on small viewports.

Originally, this occurred on viewports smaller than 900px; later that was expanded to be below 960px.

When the responsive state of the admin menu was introduced in WordPress 3.8 as part of the MP6 redesign, the scope of the auto-fold behavior was limited to between 782px and 960px.

On today's devices, those widths only occur in a handful of limited scenarios: intentionally narrowed viewports, iPad Air in portrait mode, and smaller iPad Pro devices in portrait mode are the primary cases.

The collapsed menu can still be useful for some users, and this is not proposing to remove the ability to fold the menu; but the automatic folding behavior is now obsolete.

This proposal is limited to removing the behavior that automatically triggers a folded menu & to move the trigger for the responsive menu to happen at 960px.

This would help resolve issues like #46307, in that this menu would only ever appear if a user has explicitly made the choice to use it, and they would be able to change that choice if they needed clarification on a specific item in the menu. Right now, if you are inside that narrow viewport range, your only option for the menu is a version that has no visible labels at the top level and can be difficult to understand.

[rishabhwp]

Hi, I’d love to work on this issue. I’ll look into it and raise a PR soon.

[rishabhwp]

I’ve started working on this and wanted to clarify the intended scope before opening a PR.

The ticket description appears to be limited to removing the behavior that automatically triggers a folded menu & to move the trigger for the responsive menu to happen at 960px, while the discussion in Slack seemed to suggest removing auto-fold more broadly. There are two possible approaches:

1. Behaviour change only: Remove the automatic folding between 782px and 960px and move the responsive menu breakpoint to 960px, while keeping the auto-fold body class and related functionality intact.

2. Full cleanup: Remove the auto-fold class, the unfold user setting, and the related .auto-fold styles elsewhere in the admin. This could potentially affect plugins or themes relying on body.auto-fold.

Could you clarify which direction you had in mind? I just want to make sure the PR matches the intended scope.

[aduth]

Noting that this may affect places where the current breakpoint values are described. For example, the ​source of @wordpress/base-styles describes 960px as "admin sidebar auto folds" and we'd want to update the comment in Gutenberg if that no longer applies.

For visibility, I think these choices could also help inform ​design system breakpoint tokens, whose values would be expected to carry some meaning for how they'd be applied.

[joedolson]

@rishabhwp The goal is to eliminate the automatic behavior of folding the menu. There should still be the capacity to choose for the menu to be folded, it just should happen automatically - only by user choice, which can include a value from a user setting.