James Koster

In addition to features like Reusable Blocks a number of other global concepts emerge in the Site Editor:

• Navigation management
• Template management
• Styles
• Site settings

And yet we lack a centralised area in the UI in which to manage these things. Consequently there is a lack of clarity with regards to whether a setting is local or not. For example Global Styles appears on the same plane as block settings.

As a part of #36667 I’ve been ideating on high level design options to improve this. In particular I’m drawn to a left-hand panel with an inverted color scheme as a home for features that are global in scope. The icon column is a common design pattern for adding layers of navigation that we see in software like Slack and VSCode.

One reason I’m particularly excited about this concept is that it provides an intuitive way to navigate to (and edit) your posts / pages in the site editor, something that as yet has proven tricky to get right.

A subsequent idea emerges that in the far future it could be possible to manage posts and all manner of other WordPress functionality here:

Until then, this feels like a promising idea for the Site Editor. Follow along in #36667.