Provide direction on how to interact with posts listed inside a Query Loop

[mrfoxtalbot]

What problem does this address?

I have run into a lot of users who, when using the Site Editor for the first time and interacting with the Query Block, will try to edit the content of the post that is being show/listed inside.

This is not possible because that content is coming from a post, so the user would need to head over the post and edit it there.

The way it currently works, it is just not possible to edit the content of those blocks at all, but no direction or explanation is provided.

I recorded a video of someone interacting with the query block for the first time to illustrate how frustrating and confusing this can be:

clideo_editor_4c90a93c29f44faeabeb60d125a545f7.mp4

Please note that this is a user who has been working with WordPress for over 10 years and are fairly confortable using the block editor to write posts and pages.

What is your proposed solution?

1. A very basic solution would be to revisit the text description on the Query Loop. Currently it says the following:

An advanced block that allows displaying post types based on different query parameters and visual configurations.

Create a new post for this feed.

We could modify that text to explicitly say that posts cannot be edited there, and provide a second link to the post list.

An advanced block that allows displaying post types based on different query parameters and visual configurations.

You can change the content of these posts by editing them directly here or create a new post for this feed.

2. On top of that, it would be even more useful if we could detect that the user is trying to edit the content of the blocks, and show some kind of tooltip of message directing the to edit the posts on the post list.

3. A slightly better version of the above would be to provide a link to edit that specific post and have the link open in a new window. They would need to refresh the Site Editor to see the changes, but we could explain this it would be much more convenient.

4. The optimal solution would be for posts to be editable within the Query Loop. This is probably very challenging technically and has a number of implications I have not through, but it would be the most convenient and intuitive way to interact with the content of the posts.

[github-actions]

Hi,
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Thanks for helping out.

[carolinan]

I would be interested in knowing why they want to edit the content there. What was the goal they were trying to achieve? I think this is important to know to be able to create a solution.

[mrfoxtalbot]

I would be interested in knowing why they want to edit the content there. What was the goal they were trying to achieve?

This user was just trying to edit the content of their homepage. They saw "Editor" in their Action Bar and clicked on it (instead of new post/page). They landed their homepage in the Site Editor (which was set to "recent posts") but were unaware of the fact that the content there came from their posts.

In the case of text blocks, maybe we could show a message when someone tries to type while having them selected?.

The query post does show a message, but it is very easy to over see it.

Unfortunately, I do not have a clear solution to this, but I feel this is a common pain point.

[getdave]

I have also observed this behaviour on several recent user-testing sessions.

I would be interested in knowing why they want to edit the content there. What was the goal they were trying to achieve? I think this is important to know to be able to create a solution.

Taking this as a prompt. The user selected a Theme which had a grid of images on the screenshot / preview of the Theme. Then when they landed in the Site Editor they tried to change the images to make them more suited to their homepage.

What they didn't realise was that the "grid of images" was not a Gallery but in fact a Query Loop of a series of Post Featured Image blocks. There was nothing that alerted this users to the fact that this was the case and being new to WordPress they did not have the context for:

• utilising the List View
• understanding that these images were children of a particular parent block
• understanding that the Images actually represented entities that were synced to other areas of their site (i.e. Posts)

I think sometimes - despite our best efforts - we (myself included) forget that users may lack this context. We need to make the affordances around complex blocks such as Query Loop much clearer. Perhaps upon first interaction we need some kind of "notice" to explain what the block represents.

We could also consider using custom names for such blocks in Themes which use them. For example it could be given a custom name of "My Latest Posts" and that might help guide the user.

Ultimately however we need to find a way of making this block a lot clearer.