Now that the majority of sections across WordPress.org are updated, with a consistent header and secondary navigation bar, the sections of the site that—when logged out—show the WordPress adminbar, stand out. Those sections feature the adminbar only to offer login and register links, features which are not going to be relevant to the majority of visitors. The adminbar appearing causes both a layout shift, and gives undue prominence to links that are only situationally relevant to a minority of users:

• I want to create a list of favorite themes|plugins|patterns.
• I want to build and upload a theme|plugin|pattern.
• I want to contribute to documentation, or WordPress itself.
• I want to participate in the forums.
• Any combination of the above.

Here's a recent audit of sections that feature the adminbar, showing a ❌ next to the sections that still include it:

From this audit, we can extract the following sections still showing the adminbar, purely to support login/register links:

• Themes
• Plugins
• Patterns
• Learn
• Forums
• Make & Make P2s
• Photos

For those pages, there appears to be plenty of room to simply add a "Sign-in" link to the secondary navigation toolbar, like so:

Doing so would both avoid the layout shift of the adminbar appearing or disappearing as you navigate across the site, and it would also make the sign in link secondary to the primary navigation, thus implying its context implicitly: I can sign in here to submit a theme.

When you click "Sign in" you see this page:

On that page, if you click "Create an account" you see this page:

Here's a full flow of the suggested changes:

Note, this flow includes the mockup for a refreshed login page (#241). That's a separate effort.

Figma.

When you are successfully logged in, show the adminbar across the whole site. Shown here, logged out, and in, for the Forums section:

Summary:

• Remove the adminbar for logged out users on Themes, Plugins, Patterns, Learn, Forums, Make, Make P2s and Photos.
• Add the sign-in link in the secondary navigation bar on those same pages.
• When logged in, the adminbar should be present on every page of the site.

Issue updated Aug 21.

Previous version of this issue ↓

Doing a quick review of navigating across all sections of WordPress.org this morning, and noticing a jump in the top navigation for every page that shows the adminbar. It seems that in every case where the adminbar shows, it exists to surface the login and register links. Here are pages that show the adminbar for this reason.

News:

Themes:

Plugins:

Patterns:

Learn:

Forums:

Make (both landing and all P2s):

Photos:

FFTF:

Also for reference, when you click "Log In" you see this page:

When you click "Register" you see this page:

In all these cases, those login/register links exist in context of those pages either being editable by contributors, or places where people can submit themes patterns, or otherwise. Those are all page-contextual actions, however, which suggest hierarchically those links should exist in context of the page, rather than in context of the site as they do when they are the first thing on the page.

Outside of fixing the hierarchy, addressing the jump is especially important on mobile, where those buttons get extra prominence and height:

Suggestions

• Can we remove the log-in links and adminbar from Five for the Future? It's not clear why it needs to be there at all.
• Move all login and register links into a secondary navigation bar.

Mockup showing a single unified Log in/Register link:

This single link leans into WordPress/wporg-main-2022#241, which puts a "Register" link right on the login page that'll take you there: