I agree mostly with the concerns many have pitched above, certainly in the areas where drilling down is excessive and the need to have the front end visible when working with the backend settings.

What I do like about the above videos is a little bit of the drill down. So, having just the top level with content: Pages, posts, media, CPTs, without the distraction of everything else and then sliding into more views, to see plugins and all the rest. Slide into plugins and then into each to do settings. Instead of the the front end on the right, just have big panes with settings for configuration, in context to what you are doing at the time. All this done with AJAX of course (or whatever they are calling it these days) so we don’t have to deal with interminable page loads where internet connection is slow… that does waste a lot of my time.

And, as well as the above have a toggle to show all the back end menu for those moments when it’s good to see everything as a flat list. Best of both worlds then.

I fear though that such logical design will ever be used or encouraged. While the new block editor is in many ways a great improvement over the classic editor, it falls down for a lot of use cases. For example a UI for post types where you can turn off the block builder content area and just have custom fields, setup specifically for controlled data entry, fronted by what ever layout template that a designer has created elsewhere.

The way that the Gutenberg project is conceived is very much in the vein of fitting the blog use case, without much scope for other sophisticated ways of using WordPress, unless you start hacking on third party solutions.

Let’s see what they come up with.