Pages: allow setting Homepage from the contextual menu without visiting Customizer or Reading Settings

[lancewillett]

Suggested change

Allow setting the initial option for choosing a page as static “Homepage” when the site is set to show the latest posts as the homepage.

Context

We want to empower site authors to not need the Customizer to build their site quickly and easily from Calypso.

We want to make sure they can learn via hints in the UI, and be empowered to make changes themselves.

The Issue

In the default state, WordPress.com sites show the blog feed as the homepage.

The following is what shows up in Site > Pages area in Calypso:

Item A on the screenshot takes you to the front-end of the site. As a user, I might assume that this takes me somewhere I can change this behavior and set an actual landing page as the homepage, — but it doesn’t.

If I want to change this… where do I go?

Answer A: Create a new page, and call it “Home”? Nope.
Answer B: Click on that icon A on the screenshot? Nope.
Answer C: Click on the three dots on the page I added to my site, and look for an option to “Set as homepage”, and use that to change this? Nope:

Question/Request

If not just placing the controls into the Pages contextual menu — even in the default state — suggest making at least a usability change.

Could we link to the appropriate section in the Customizer right here? Using the wording “Front page is showing your latest posts” to provide the link. Similar to what we have in My Home for editing menus.

Props @davipontesblog for starting this idea.

I don’t think this will solve all the confusion about having posts in the homepage or a static page, and this might not be an issue in the future as having posts in your homepage might rely entirely on static pages with a Posts block, but, for now, it could save a lot of headache and churn (“I wanted a website, not a blog!” said a frustrated user every once in a while in chat).

Thanks for considering!

[lancewillett]

Possibly related: #37719 and #41896

[ianstewart]

I made some notes about the current default state on WP.com.

Four pages are created by default …

• Home
• About
• Contact
• Blog

Home is set as a Homepage in Calypso.

Bug: There is no clear way to unset the Homepage in Calypso …

… unless you wanted to make another page a Homepage or a Posts Page.

A Posts Page is what a user might call a Blog Page. It’s the status for a Page that tells WordPress to use a particular PHP Theme Template, ignoring the content of a Page, instead “looping” through all the available posts.

We can see the same status in the Customizer although here it is possible to unset the Homepage and revert back to core WordPress defaults.

If we un-set the Homepage in the Customizer …

Bug: No options are available in Calypso.

[ianstewart]

@johnHackworth @olaolusoga resolving this one won't make the mental model easier to understand but it might be a good quick fix to look at?

[davipontesblog]

Thanks @ianstewart for taking the time to go over the flow here. Ideally, we want to move every action and decision out of the Customizer and into the Pages list here I believe. If that is the goal, we need to ensure users can:

• Set the site to show either a static page as its homepage or just the blog feed as the homepage;
• Set a page as homepage in any circumstance;
• Set a page as "posts" page in any circumstance as well.

These are the decisions and actions you can take in the Customizer today if it helps.

[github-actions]

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[ianstewart]

You can also wind up in this state if you have no pages at all.

Different from the experience of a default state or theme switch that leaves you with a Blog page.

Also, while you can’t delete them from Calypso you can delete the homepage from the editor. But you can’t get to the Blog page from Calypso unless you edit it from the front-end. Which takes you … here?

[creativecoder]

This is tough one to solve currently, with so many interrelated parts:

• New sites have the home page setting (page vs latest post) somewhat arbitrarily set based on the Headstart annotations for the theme
• There's Gutenberg work to be done surfacing the setting in the Site editor that would help (Site Editing: Explore how we might set what's displayed on the front of a site from within the site editor WordPress/gutenberg#28341)
• Whatever we do, it should integrate with the onboarding work planned for assembling vertical specific page content (pbxlJb-XO-p2)

[Addison-Stavlo]

This hasn't moved in a while, idea for a quick fix would be to:

• Always show the 'homepage status banner'. Im referring to the conditional banner that appears above the page list that says "The homepage is showing your latest posts." and has a link to the front-end of the homepage. To always show, we could show this in the case that posts are set as the homepage as well with a similar but different description.
• Add a link to to 'Settings -> Reading' within this banner. There Homepage settings are the first option at the top of the page and can be managed there.

It seems like this would be a quick fix that would make this process more visible to users. Since there hasn't been any movement on this, it would be nice to see something helpful - even if just a simple / imperfect solution like adding a quick description and link might be beneficial here. cc @ianstewart - im curious if you have thoughts here?

[Addison-Stavlo]

At this point I think its unclear what needs to be done here in the current state, and is not in our current scope of work. This is less of a bug and more of an unknown feature request. Im removing this from our board since we will not get to it any time soon.

[cuemarie]

📌 SCRUBBING NOTES

Still the case that it is not possible to set a page as a static homepage while the homepage is set to the theme default. In that state, the actions for other pages exclude setting as home or posts page:

However, once a static homepage is set via the Customer or Settings > Reading, then other pages can be set as home or posts pages via the page list:

📌 ACTIONS

• Landing in 'feature requests' for now

📌 Message to Author

• Thanks for the update on Cylon's scope around this, @Addison-Stavlo !