Welcome Guide: Should be possible to link to a page via URL

[folletto]

The idea of Tips is that they should provide a framework to allow creating dialog-based guidance for feature, regardless of being as short as one message, or as long as a multi-step wizard.

However, I've done some research and there seem to be no URL-based way to trigger the tips, as I had to clear by local application data to make them toggle again.

Suggestion:

• introduce a framework-level trigger via URL, for example ?tip=editor-first-time that triggers the specific flow as needed.

Why?

1. URLs provide a way for support to guide the user easily in new features
2. Existing help and documentation could link directly tips tutorials in order to provide guidance
3. Specific tutorials can be re-run as needed

This will open a massively beneficial new way to provide help across WordPress.

[draganescu]

@noisysocks is NUX still something we want to update with features?

[noisysocks]

No, @wordpress/nux is deprecated in favour of Guide in @wordpress/components.

[noisysocks]

Although, re-reading this, I can see that it might be a useful enhancement to have WelcomeGuide look at the URL when determining whether or not to display.

[folletto]

Yes, this feature stands regardless of the system chosen.
It should be possible to trigger it manually with a specific URL, as it would make it possible to create support interfaces, linked activated directly from the UI or from a support page, in a stateless way.

Please reopen this for WelcomeGuide.

[t-hamano]

If I understand correctly, this issue can't be solved by doing conditional rendering based on URL parameters?

/**
 * WordPress dependencies
 */
import { Guide } from '@wordpress/components';
import { useState } from '@wordpress/element';

export default function SomeComponent() {
	const url = new URL( window.location.href );
	const isFirstTime = url.searchParams.get( 'tip' ) === 'editor-first-time';
	const [ isOpen, setIsOpen ] = useState( isFirstTime );
	return (
		isFirstTime &&
		isOpen && (
			<Guide
				finishButtonText={ 'Close' }
				onFinish={ () => setIsOpen( false ) }
				pages={ [ { content: <p>Hello World!</p> } ] }
			/>
		)
	);
}

[draganescu]

I think the idea is to include a standard way to avoid:

const url = new URL( window.location.href );
const isFirstTime = url.searchParams.get( 'tip' ) === 'editor-first-time';

🤷🏻 I think.

[t-hamano]

This issue has had no activity for almost a year, and there are implementation examples in the comment.

I don’t believe this is a problem that can be solved by Gutenberg, so I’m closing this issue.