Clear up confusion between “Save & Publish” button and publishing posts

[westonruter]

If you edit a post and set its status to “draft” it is very confusing that the “Save & Publish” button mentions “Publish”. Users would assume this would switch the Draft status into Publish when you click it, but it doesn't. Via @ahmadawais:

In the Customize Snapshots plugin, this one button is broken up into two:

As the Customizer state can be saved separately from making the changes live. The confusion is still present here for posts, however.

The terminology for “making changes live” needs to be improved. Instead of “Publish” it could instead be “Commit”. It could also be just “Save”, but then we'd need to change the label for snapshots to be something else.

[ahmadawais]

Snapshots UI makes a lot more sense!

[westonruter]

@valendesigns if we changed “Publish” (go live) to “Save”, when what do you think would be a good alternative for the current snapshot Save/Update button? I keep going back to Git terminology, like using “Commit” for publish and “Stage” or “Stash” for save/update snapshot. These aren't helpful for non-technical users.

[valendesigns]

We could change "Save" to "Snapshot", but I'm not convinced that's any better or that there really is going to be anything that makes it more clear other than adding a tooltip to "Save" that explains what you're doing.

[kienstra]

Question About Solution

Hi @westonruter,
In Customize Posts, would you like to change the “Save & Publish” button to instead display “Save,” as you mentioned above? And should that only be for when panels for Customize Posts are open, like the “Posts" and "Pages” panels?

It seems like it might make sense for the button to display “Save & Publish” for all other Customizer panels. Because it’ll actually publish the changes. Of course, it’s different on Customize Snapshots.

[westonruter]

I think we should potentially eliminate “publish” entirely from this customizer button that makes changes live, regardless of whether you are in a post section or not. I'm not totally sure on the right words to use, but I'm sure it should be consistent across all customizer sections.

[kienstra]

Request For Review Of Pull Request

Hi @westonruter,
Thanks, that makes sense to remove "Publish" from the button. Could you please see this pull request, which implements a new name for the 'Save & Publish' button? It's 'Save' for the moment, pending whatever name you'd like to give it.

As you suggested in #35547, this overwrites api.l10n.save. When the Customizer initially loads, the value (text) of the button is 'Save & Publish'. In about 500 milliseconds, it replaces this with 'Saved'.

[jeffpaul]

What about moving the Status dropdown selection into the Save/Publish buttons and have some sort of hover or long press/click on the Save button show additional statuses to select?

We'd probably still want to show the Status field, but maybe just as a read only label below/next to these buttons?