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Sarah Gooding

Take the WordPress Editor Experience Survey

photo credit: Joanna Kosinska

WordPress core contributors have published a survey to collect feedback on how people are using the editor. The results of the short 15-question survey will assist the team in redesigning the editing experience in the WordPress admin.

Participants are asked to identify how they use WordPress and if they use certain features like formatting buttons and distraction-free writing. The survey also asks how easy-to-use they consider the current editor to be and how organized it is. Users are also asked if they have ever installed a plugin that adds features to the editor, presumably to determine if there are features missing that should be considered for core.

One question asks participants if they use any assistive technologies along with a screen reader. WordPress Accessibility team member Amanda Rush published some tips for screen reader users who want to take the survey. It includes several questions with radio buttons and screenshots that are not so friendly to screen readers. Rush provides a general walk-through with more explanation for those who are using screen readers to participate.

So far, this survey has been more widely shared than the design team’s recent customizer survey, which was published after receiving just 50 results. WordPress contributors rely heavily on these surveys to make decisions about projects they are working on, as they do not have any telemetry data about what features people are using or not using. This is one example where data could quickly demonstrate how widely the distraction-free writing mode has been adopted and show what editor formatting buttons people are using.

If you have a few minutes over the weekend and want to contribute to the future of WordPress, take the Editor Experience Survey.

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10 responses to “Take the WordPress Editor Experience Survey”

    • I took the survey as well. Thanks for keeping us up to date Sarah. My main take is that the destructive quality of the WordPress editor should come to an end. I.e. the wpautop filter which means switching between visual and code

      It’s high time for coloured syntax highlighting as well. Every other editor I use has syntax highlighting at this point.

      There’s an in-depth conversation about screen readers and the code editor on Trac. As none of the good open source code editors offer accessibility, some in the WordPress development community are advocating for staying with a plain text editor. Others are advocating adding many advanced features to the plain text editor for screen reader users while offering an advanced visual code editor at the same time. I.e. treating both screen reader users and non-screen reader users as high priority use cases. The alternative is the rather unpalatable depriving everyone of an advanced code editor.

      it’s a very interesting conversation with lots of well-argued views. The current decisions about the WordPress visual editor and code editor will shape the WordPress experience forever (okay not forever, for the next five years).

      For those interested, here are all the filters run on the current WordPress editor:

      wptexturize – makes fancy quotes etc.
      convert_chars – HTML special chars
      make_clickable – makes the plain text links clickable
      force_balance_tags – makes sure there is no broken HTML
      convert_smilies – Emojis
      wpautop – without this the linebreaks are lost

      A few should surely be optional (wptexturize, convert_smilies, make_clickable). The main one which should go is wpautop as it is responsible for mangling html every time a writer switches from visual editor to code editor. It’s why it’s so hard to post code reliably in a WordPress website without adding a custom editor or turning off the visual editor.

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  3. How does wptavern find out about the surveys because I don’t see them marketed anywhere. I would like not to miss any future ones.

    Does it get promoted on social media for example? Getting 50 responses on a survey that affects 27% of the internet’s websites is not good enough and points to awareness problems. I would have expected thousands of responses.

    Also I believe moodle built its own accessible rich text editor and is open source:
    https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Atto
    https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=editor_atto

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