Reordering Site Editor Menu

[luminuu]

What problem does this address?

There’s already an issue existing to consider moving the Styles menu item to the top of the site editor navigation (#68576). With this issue I’d like to start a discussion about expanding this idea to give the user the ability to reorder the entire menu.

Currently, the site editor menu is static. Navigation is the first item, once a website is mainly done, the navigation won’t be touched as often as in the early stages of website creation. Similarly, in a later stage of a website’s life, the Patterns might be the most used area within the site editor, so having it at the top makes it easier to focus and land on.

Another idea on top of this could be having the theme give a different structure via theme.json.

What is your proposed solution?

Implement reordering of the menu items on a per-user basis, with information being stored in the wp_usermeta table. In addition, a theme can be able to reorder the menu items via theme.json. If nothing is set, the current default structure will be shown. There will be no option to remove any items, as this should be covered by the capabilities feature.

[karmatosed]

I really think there is a strong use case from several groups and implementations for this. I also put this under extensibility as it's really fititng there to me but happy to remove it.

What I feel needs to be a starting decision is whether existing plans are in place to implement this or not. If they are when are they roadmapped?

[karmatosed]

I have some updates to this after exploring more how this could be done. I explored if you can indeed reorder using CSS alone. The result of my findings is that even with some pretty out there thinking around CSS you just can't do this right now without also implementing JS. This means even a simple menu reordering becomes complex.

Many user cases are going to want to reorder menus and even hide some. This feels like something of a priority, based on how it currently has to be done - JS scripting also won't be reliable for any updates and is flimsy at best.