Editing: Bring Users to Editor from Pages and Posts in Webviews

[thehenrybyrd]

We recently removed the “edit” link from pages/posts when visiting a site from within the apps.
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This is great, and will likely reduce confusion since it will reduce/eliminate the possibility to get to wp-admin or Calypso from within the apps.
However, we’ve had a few users complaining about this - they can no longer edit their posts via their normal flow.

For those we’ve gotten responses from, the flow is:

1. Open the WordPress app.
2. Go to My Site and scroll down to View Site
3. Navigate to a post you’d like to edit
4. Tap the “edit” link.
5. Edit the post (we’re now using Calypso within the in-app browser, though users are not aware of this).

Without the “edit” link, it’s really hard to get to where they can edit posts, and several have complained when we suggest going directly to My Site > Blog Posts.

In addition, users want to be able to change font colors when editing posts. Both #2148242-zen and #2143888-zen mention this.

It would be great if we could have the edit link back, but direct folks to the editing the correct post within the app. I’m guessing this might be quite complex technically though, and it won’t solve users wanting to color text in their posts.

[designsimply]

In addition, users want to be able to change font colors when editing posts. Both #2148242-zen and #2143888-zen mention this.

I think not being able to edit how they would like is the main reason they are asking to edit within a webview. This is exactly the kind of thing we'll want to document going forward, especially because the proposed solution to add back the edit link and point it back to the editors within the app won't solve the problem of not being able to add colors to specific words or phrases within a paragraph. This means that the underlying problem, at least for the two specific cases we know about so far, is that those users cannot edit how they want to using the app.

Note: in the core Gutenberg project, the ability to color specific words or phrases within a paragraph is not supported and a plugin was provided for this purpose. See WordPress/gutenberg#6080.

[thehenrybyrd]

Another report of trying to edit using the now-missing "edit" button in #2196119-zen. Asking about their workflow.

@designsimply re: your note: core Gutenberg is considering adding text-level color settings: WordPress/gutenberg#15899

[designsimply]

Noting a report of this that came in from @charliescheer as a mobile request:

Currently the edit link is still there but can not be clicked on. I was wondering if what we could do instead is have the edit button go back into the app and edit the post that they are viewing. In my mind the flow would look like: User goes to My site > Blog Posts > View post [for Post X] User views the post, finds something the want to change and clicks on the edit link The app transitions them from the webView to the post editor and loads Post X

Text color, and text alignment were specifically mentioned.

We do not allow the editors to open in Webviews because it is unstable. What we need to know are the reasons why users preferred editing in Webviews so that we can understand their real goals and try to help them accomplish those. For example, providing a pathway back to the app wouldn't help a user who would like to add color and text alignment in the block editor because those options are not yet supported. We need to track those underlying reasons for these requests and which editors people are using.

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[charliescheer]

I spoke to a few users about this since it happened. Anecdotally, most people used the edit button as part of their workflow. They found it the easiest way to view then edit a post. But there were a few people who mentioned using the color or alignment tools.

But for most people it was about workflow

[rfaile313]

Thanks for the report @thehenrybyrd - I've seen a few reports about this, for example in #2200024-zen

[designsimply]

@charliescheer would you say you can help them change their workflow from View Site (which should not be used for editing) to using Blog Posts or Site Pages instead? In the cases where they just were used to using the Edit button in Webviews, they got used to using a route that it was not intended for and we should help educate them about how to use the editor provided in the app.

@rfaile313 I looked up 2200024-zen and they never provided a reason for why they want the unsupported route to using an editor inside of a webview. If you see this come up again, can you please let them know it's not a bug and the supported way to access the editor in the mobile apps is through the Blog Posts or Site Pages links in the My Site menu? If that doesn't work for them, please add a comment here with a user quote noting why.

[charliescheer]

It depends on the user. Some of them have said to me that they went through view site > edit because the edit there had more formatting tools available than what was in the app editor.

In other cases it seemed like users who had gotten adjusted to going to view site to find the edit button.

I have continued to ask for more information about their workflow, but haven't gotten much back

[designsimply]

A related issue was reported in 14.1 beta testing. There's a really nice video attached at #13314 showing the problem in action.