Saving the post using keyboard shortcut (cmd+s) doesn't save the related entities

[adamziel]

In the old, single-entity editing world, there was only the editor and the post. Pressing cmd+s (or ctrl+s) saved a draft, and it made sense.

In the new, multi-entity editing world, there is the editor, the post, the template area, the navigation, and other entities. Pressing cmd+s (or ctrl+s) still affects only the post, and that's confusing. It is easy to press it, trust the notification, and close the page only to lose any changes made to non-post entities.

This is how the experience looks like right now:

cmd.s.mp4

From the user perspective, it is unclear how cmd+s differs from clicking the save or why it doesn't work until I update the post content.

On the first glance, I would expect cmd+s to save everything as a draft and then be able to return to the exact same state as I cmd+s-ed. But what if, once I was gone, someone else updated the menu? Do I still want to see my draft, or do I want to see that updated version? I don't know. It feels very git-y in that we're getting into a conflict resolution scenario.

CC @gziolo @javierarce @jasmussen @draganescu @talldan @spacedmonkey @mtias @youknowriad

[jasmussen]

Good thoughts here, appreciate the attention to detail.

As a high level goal, I feel, saving your draft isn't something you should need to worry about. It's something that should happen automatically in the background, like it does in Docs, Figma, or most other web-apps. You make a change and it's remembered. Of course we can't do that for global content that may be live on the site.

With that goal in mind, it seems like there's an ongoing design opportunity to continue to refine multi entity saving. Keeping in mind all the pieces and where they fit in a theme, there might even be an opportunity to find an interface that shares DNA with theme switching, as a has been explored in this post by @critterverse.

Near term I understand that ⌘S needs to do something in the use case described. Can it save the draft and open the multi entity saving sidebar?

[talldan]

It does feel a bit like the entity saving flow doesn't fit as well in the post editor.

In the site editor, everything is saved via the one entity panel, which is a new level of complexity for users, but still makes life a bit easier than the post editor.

The post editor now has two panels for saving when publishing a post, which means more complexity for the user. There's one panel for entities and one panel for the post itself. But the post is really just an entity, and maybe it should be published through the entity panel as well so that the user can save everything in one step.

Doing that would make it easier for the shortcut to have the same behavior in both the site and post editors and for refinements like those mentioned above to be useful in both editors.