[Request for improvement] Block editor form field: date
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Hi! I hope you’re well :)
I’ve just been working on creating my first form in the ‘Block Editor’.
Apart from the sluggish lack of response that bedevils everything about this editor, I think the form in its present state is, in general, a huge leap forward from the previous offering.
I also feel, however, that there is a great deal of room for improvement.
Q: How do you eat an elephant? A: one bite at a time.
With that in mind, I’d like to talk about the ‘Date Picker’ form field.
You may think I’m being unkind, but I believe that I am in fact being quite fair when I say that this form field has to be, without a doubt, the most poorly-implemented software widget I have ever encountered. It is an absolute triumph of superficiality over functionality.
Specifically:
- Let’s say you want to capture a date of birth. There is no way (or, if there is, it’s hidden so cleverly as to warrant an award from the designer for being as obtuse as the most obtuse thing in the universe) to individually select a year. Nor even a month. The only option is to scroll laboriously back, month by month, through years to get to the birth year.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Oh dear… looks like this forum software could do with some work, too. But: back on topic:
- So, having given up on trying to use the pretty-but-totally-useless date picker, we resort to entering a date. There appears to be absolutely no validation of text entry into this field at all. I entered a date of ‘1919/1/1900’ — and it was perfectly ok with that! I was going to see what it did for February 29th days in leap years next, but didn’t bother because it’s clearly doing no validation whatsoever.
- Given that the so-called ‘Date Picker’ doesn’t actually allow you to pick any dates (the only ones you can reasonably pick using it are days within the current month), if the same clueless idiot who implemented this widget is given the task of fixing it, someone needs to advise them about date formats. I’m thinking in particular of the fact that USAns use ‘month-day-year’, whereas the standard on other parts of the planet are to use ‘day-month-year’ — which results in the lunacy of not being able to tell, for instance, if ‘6/7/2020’ is ‘July 6 2020’or ‘June 7 2020’
- The block configuration options for the Date Picker clearly ought to include the ability to specify the date format. I suggest taking a look at ISO 8601.
I’m sure that, given time, I could come up with other points. But, life is too short.
End of rant.
Thanks for listening! :D
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Hi there!
Thanks a lot for your feedback. I understand that you’re referring to the Form Block, is that right?
It looks like you have very clear ideas as to how this could be improved so, feel free to open a Feature Request for that block directly on GitHub:
Once again, thanks for reaching out!
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Hi, fresatomica, thank you for your response!
I (think I) am indeed referring to the Form Block (specifically, the ‘Date Picker’ block within the form).
I wasn’t aware that it was possible to submit a formal ‘Feature Request’ (I’ve recently been ‘congratulated’ by WordPress for having had my account for ten years, and I’ve learned a lot — but there’s sooo much to learn, and so little time…).
So, thank you so much for that link! I’ll follow it now and follow that up :)
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Hello again, fresatomica :) I thought I’d let you know that I’d finally submitted a ‘feature request’ for this. It took me half a day, but I got there in the end:
https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/issues/49946
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!
… now then, time for another feature request, hmm… what to call it, umm… maybe “Enhance the text input functionality of the block editor so that it doesn’t behave like a slug”?
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