Shuttle

Khaled has drawn back the curtain on Shuttle. It’s a fantastic set of work by an exceptional group of people (Khaled, Michael Heilemann, Joen Asmussen, Chris J Davis, Joshua Sigar, Bryan Veloso). There are some pretty significant shifts in there so it’ll be integrated incrementally rather than overnight, and I also plan to test out things on WordPress.com first and watch usage to make sure none of our assumptions are too far off, but I think it’s safe to say that this is a pretty significant milestone for WordPress and we have some exciting months ahead of us. Everyone should thank the Shuttle team. (Note: There will be some ongoing design work as well, especially as new features are added to WordPress. If you’re a kick-ass designer who can juggle code as well as Photoshop, drop me a line.)

16 thoughts on “Shuttle

  1. This is all great news, but why are you willing to first test it in WordPress.com rather than in future updates of WordPress? IMHO, debugging in a variety of different enviroments (different hosts, setups etc) would help more than testing in WordPress.com, which i assume is running on a unified server enviroment.

  2. Canvas is cool, I\’m grabbing a bite with those folks when I\’m back in town.

    Titanas, it can be in both WP.com and WordPress, but the only WordPress user I can track is myself. On .com I can watch how a single change affects the behavior of hundreds of thousands of people, and even show different versions to different groups, hence making sure \”none of our assumptions are too far off.\”

    Testing is a part of design that with a small sample size you don\’t really get the luxury of.

    I\’m not worried at all about it working under different server enviroments, WP already handles all of that.

  3. When fully integrated, Shuttle will change WordPress administration panel appearance from the ground up. Will that also include menus under Manage and/or Options for plugins such as Ultimate Tag Warrior?

  4. The ‘slashes\’ are getting the best of you, Matt. 🙂

    Canvas is very cool and is a credit to it’s creators – however, shuttle has a certain familiarity as although the design is radically different and features much eye-candy, the actual “structure” remains very similar to 2.0.x/ 2.1x.

    I like the fact that it will really enhance the use of wordpress, without detracting from it by completely overhauling the admin panels to the point where nothing makes sense any more, which would make a lot of existing users uncomfortable.

  5. Can someone explain what “shuttle” is going to do or help. I know about canvas though. I also agree with Brendan. 🙂

  6. I honestly don’t see enough difference between Shuttle and the current WordPress administration panel for it to be a worthwhile investment of time. The layout it essentially the same, which means the current version must be fine (it is). Shuttle also makes use of images, which increase load time and bandwidth (albeit minimally). All-in-all it seems like a waste.

    I suppose this is just one mans opinions, and considering the amout of fan-boys Shuttle already has, my voice probably falls on deaf ears. I honestly think you need to take a look at the priorities of WordPress and WordPress.com. Good luck, anyway.

  7. “I suppose this is just one mans opinions, and considering the amout of fan-boys Shuttle already has, my voice probably falls on deaf ears.”

    There’s a lot of Ajax in the back-end now, that will slow things down as well. Displaying the last 10 posts on the post edit page also requires a DB lookup, perhaps that should be cut down to 5? Where does one draw the line? 🙂

    I get what you’re saying, however if the images are kept to an efficient minimum size, the extra delay should be negligible on almost any connection. The freshen up via Shuttle is supposed to look a lot like the existing layout – it reduces the confusion created when things move.

    A lot of people freaked out when WordPress jumped from 1.5x to 2.x – all because a few items had moved.

    There has been a great deal of effort put into the core itself – having run the SVN developers version for quite some time, a lot of work has gone into 2.1 so far – it’s about time the somewhat ‘basic’ admin had a freshen up.

  8. Perhaps one has to actually use it to notice the difference. Obviously I see no AJAX in the mockups. Perhaps a list of the additions or changes that make it different from what we currently use. I honestly love the current admin panel as is.

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