Recommendation: Switch to WP Admin for All users / All platforms

Considerations:

Dotcom users will lose the virtual link access to the Homepage template.

• Can we add a component in the WP Admin view to link to the Homepage template when a Block theme is active?

Calypso offers an easy “Copy link” option that is missing in WP Admin

• Add to WP Admin? Low priority.
• If not added, Happiness should monitor if we see an uptick in users linking content to the wrong URL (aka the editor instead of the live link)

Calypso offers a “QR Code” option

• This feature shows you a QR code, which perhaps makes it easier to open the page on your phone from your computer, but you can’t make a copy of this QR Code and actually “use” it anywhere.
• Could this be excluded? Not sure if we have any data on its usage.

Note: The Copy Link and QR Code are also part of Posts, Portfolio, and Testimonials screens

I don't see any blockers for this. Let's use wp-admin for all users, as recommended!

Considerations

• Homepage/Blog page
  • Everything remains accessible, just in different locations (e.g. Site Editor, or Reading settings).
  • Ultimately, to complete the "Core-first" inversion, we must make some ruthless decisions; this seems relatively tame as a decision. 🙂
• Copy Link
  • wp-admin has the "View" quick action that performs a similar duty. I don't consider the "copy link" significant enough to think twice about losing it.
  • If HEs observe any upticks, adding "Copy Link" to the quick actions is technically trivial.
• QR Code
  • The feature exists on wp-admin Atomic already! Let's port it to Simple.
  • And let's do it as part of the duplication removal.

Homepage/Blog page

• When the Calypso version goes away for existing users, losing the Homepage link in the pages view will have at least some impact on support - this is something we'll want to avoid spiking.
• New and existing users not familiar with wp-admin and the site editor already reach out asking how to get to their homepage.

Can we at least consider a notice at top?

@tanjoymor yes to everything. 😁

Calypso pages UI also has an export page feature.

Based on the stats, nobody is using it. I think we should skip it and open a cleanup task to remove the feature entirely.

Calypso pages UI also has an export page feature.

It's an interesting feature, but incredibly niche. It exports a json of the page as a template.

{"__file":"wp_template","language":"en","title":"...","demoURL":"...","content":"..."}

I would argue that if you know how to use this kind of file, you also know how to create it manually? 🤔

for new users

We discussed this today and decided that, considering we'll release changes with a holdout test, we want to target all users (new and existing), so I updated the issue summary to reflect that. See p1733745514693799-slack-C04DZ8M0GHW.

Homepage/Blog page

• When the Calypso version goes away for existing users, losing the Homepage link in the pages view will have at least some impact on support - this is something we'll want to avoid spiking.
• New and existing users not familiar with wp-admin and the site editor already reach out asking how to get to their homepage.

Can we at least consider a notice at top?

@matt-west any idea of what design can we use to port this notice to WP Admin?

Here are some images for reference: the one on the left displays the notice, and the on the right is the WP Admin page where we want to include it.

Calypso	WP Admin

what design can we use to port this notice to WP Admin?

For now, I'm exploring something in this direction:

@mmtr I think that’s fine as a stop-gap solution.

We should work with Core on a solution for surfacing the home page template that can work for everyone though. I don’t think this is an issue that’s unique to Dotcom. (cc @jasmussen)

It's not clear that it's a win to show a big notice pointing out which page in the list is the homepage, since such a notice will also be intrinsically separate to the actual page.

In DataViews, the homepage is shown as a chip indication next to the actual page: WordPress/gutenberg#56244 (comment)

Does that help?