An Interesting Concept For Front-end Editing – Inline Access

Amidst the different projects currently ongoing around WordPress, there is one that will potentially change the way in which we edit published content. It’s called Front-end Editor and is being developed as part of the features as plugins program. While the initial concept and mockups look good, there is another perspective by Mark Root-Wiley that folks should take a look at, inline access.

Rather than editing content “inline” on the front-end, let users click editable chunks of content to drill down to the appropriate admin edit page. To be clear, this is explicitly and intentionally not front-end editing.

The “Info Bar” — Sister of the Admin Bar, provides contextual information about the page.

Inline access is interesting because instead of actually editing the text on the page, the idea is to take you specifically to the place in the administration area to edit the text instead. In Mark’s concept, there’s an ‘info bar‘ and ‘edit mode tool tips‘. This would be built into the existing admin bar. Once the edit tool bar was selected, you’d be able to see outlined regions of the page that are available for editing. I like this technique because the info bar provides information such as content type, templates, and where the content is being applied and where to go in the administration area to edit the content. This not only provides an easy way to edit content, but the educational aspects of it are a big bonus.

Please read through his idea and provide any feedback you have in the comments.