For a long time people have been suggesting / daydreaming / ​wishing for a unified notification center in WordPress. People expect it, the notification center has become a staple of almost all apps/sites that have a lot to keep track of - and WordPress definitely fits in that lineup. So there’s no reason not to add one to WordPress core too.



This ticket aims to explore the details of such an implementation. I think clear limitations, a good backwards compatibility strategy and a strong UX are key to make this work for everyone.



Key features:



One location for all notifications.

Easy to hook into, should work out of the box.

Flexible enough to be useful, limited enough to not get a circus.

Accessible from anywhere.

Accessible in the a11y sense.

Here’s my first basic idea for notification properties, feel free to chime in:



A text field, limited to 280 characters, the length of a tweet. Probably wouldn’t want one notification to get so long that it fills up the whole visible sidebar. Links can be added to the text to trigger actions or visit pages, same as now basically.

A timestamp.

An icon. Could be the plugin icon, author avatar, or something like a category/message type, like info, warning, question, error, update, stuff like that, to visually distinguish notifications quickly.

A status, meaning read or unread basically.

Persist/show as toast. A suggestion by Joen Asmussen. Shows the notification outside the notification center for a set amount of time in a floating div. Similar to what Android/MacOS/Windows does when a notification comes in. Maybe only WordPress itself can throw notices like that. Probably not for MVP anyway.

I created a quick interactive proof-of-concept in Sketch that you can view here.



Desktop: ​https://sketch.cloud/s/AZz0M/all/notification-center/desktop/play

Mobile: ​https://sketch.cloud/s/AZz0M/all/notification-center/iphone-8-plus/play



Riad Benguella got excited by this idea and built a basic plugin to test it in your own WordPress install. ​https://github.com/youknowriad/newtify, and also a previous exploration at ​https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-notification-center/. Developing this as a plugin is a great way to explore the best implementation, and any help is more than welcome.



Some discussion points to get this started:

