Add descriptions to all panels in the Site Editor's dark sidebar

[jameskoster]

The description affordance in the design provides space for us to explain complex concepts like templates and template parts, and generally make the site editing experience feel more friendly / approachable. We should make use of this affordance and to empty panels like this one:

• Design panel: Site Editor: Add a description to the Design panel #48712
• Navigation panel: Navigation Sidebar: Change the logic about which navigation gets selected for the sidebar #48689
• Templates panel
• Manage templates panel
• Template Parts panel
• Manage template parts panel
• Individual template part panels: Expanding the contents of the details panel when viewing a template part #48483

[jameskoster]

A first pass at those panels that do not already have a dedicated issue:

Templates

Express the layout of your site with templates.

Manage templates

Create new templates, or reset any customisations made to the templates supplied by your theme.

Template Parts

Template Parts are small pieces of a layout that can be reused across multiple templates and always appear the same way. Common template parts include the site header, footer, or sidebar.

Manage template parts

Create new template parts, or reset any customisations made to the template parts supplied by your theme.

[jasmussen]

Good one. This issue is one of the most important ones we need to still land for 6.2. Just going through these and adding my own:

• Design
  "Customise your Navigation menus, Templates, and more."
  • Design → Navigation (:white_check_mark:)
    • Design → Navigation → Page
      "This is a static page.", at minimum
    • Design → Navigation → Posts page
      Ideally "This is your posts page." but "This is a static page." at minimum.
  • Design → Templates
    "Express the layout of your site with templates." seems fine.
    • Design → Templates → Manage all templates
      "Create new templates, or reset any customisations made to the templates supplied by your theme." seems good.
  • Design → Template Parts
    "Template Parts are small pieces of a layout that can be reused across multiple templates and always appear the same way. Common template parts include the site header, footer, or sidebar." seems good.
    • Design → Template Parts → Manage all template parts
      "Create new template parts, or reset any customisations made to the template parts supplied by your theme." seems good.
    • Design → Template Parts → [any random template part]
      At minimum: "This is your [any random template part] part."
    • Design → Template Parts → [any random custom template part]
      At minimum: "This is your [any custom template part] part."

[jasmussen]

Essentially, no drilldown detail page should ever be empty. There should always be, at minimum, a description.

It might be useful (not urgent) to refactor the component so a description becomes required, i.e. it outputs something like "This detail page is missing a description".

[jameskoster]

"This is your posts page."

That's a great point. It would be nice if we can mark all those key pages, like in the wp-admin list view:

[jasmussen]

Yep. But if it becomes a challenge to snatch those special descriptions, we can do that in a V2, a V1 should at least have a "page" description. 👍 👍