"Stick to the front page" should be contextually aware of what the front page displays

[mor10]

Issue Overview

Under the Document panel, the Sticky post feature says "Stick to Front Page". This is only accurate if the site has the blog index as the front page.

Steps to Reproduce (for bugs)

1. Set a static page as the front page and a different static page as the blog index.
2. Create a Gutenberg post.
3. Look at the wording for the Sticky post toggle.

Expected Behavior

When "Your homepage displays" is set to a static page and the blog index is placed on a separate static page, the wording of the Sticky post toggle should reflect this:

• When blog index is front page: "Stick to the Front Page"
• When static page is front page: "Stick to the top of blog index" or similar

Current Behavior

"Stick to the Front Page" is displayed in all circumstances.

Possible Solution

Make the Sticky post text contingent on the current front page settings.

[karmatosed]

I agree it should make more sense contextually. However, I think we could be a little more human in our description - 'blog index' isn't an easy term for non advanced users. What about:

'Blog posts: stick to front'

Even better, could this setting just hide when a page is set on front?

[mor10]

Now that I think about it I'm not sure exactly how the sticky post feature works. Does a sticky post only stick on top of the index if the index is the front page of the site but not if the index is a separate page?

If so, "Blog posts: stick to front" makes sense. If the sticky post feature works regardless of where the blog index is positioned, then the feature has merit regardless of front page settings.

I'm not sure "stick to front" is descriptive enough to actually explain what's going on. It begs the question "what does 'stick' and 'front' mean?" I feel like there's some better way of explaining it - like "make first visible post" or "bring to front of post list" or something like that. The whole "stick to top/front" terminology is inherited from old school forums and has almost no contextual meaning in the modern WordPress post index world.

[aaronjorbin]

Stick to the Front Page makes 100% sense if you know what front means, which isn't an assumption we should make.

How about Stick to Homepage and Stick to Posts page depending on what is selected? That would make things a bit more consistent with the options page (screenshot below)

[mor10]

That sounds like a clean solution to me.

[WPprodigy]

Would it be out of scope to expose the show_on_front WP option to the REST API's settings endpoint via register_rest_field in this plugin?

Not 100% sure what's best practice for a feature plugin like this. As far as I can tell Gutenberg hasn't needed to do this yet as all the data it needs has been available from the REST API.

[Clorith]

I'd like to make the argument that "stick to *" makes little sense regardless of what term we put behind it.

The feature is more discoverable in Gutenberg, in thew classic editor you need to manually click to edit the post status to access this feature, and I suspect many users therefore don't know about it in the first place.

Contextually awareness would help a little, but themes and plugins can change this without you ever having known about it until now, or what if your theme uses a static front page, but the theme authors chose to add in a latest posts section that is affected by this, in which case the contextual bit would be a problem.

[haicu]

I agree with Clorith. In the gutenberg editor screen one of the first things I encounter for a post is the option to "stick to the front page". This is confusing wording. What actually happens when you make a post sticky is that it is put on top of the post list. So I would suggest that the wording reflects that behaviour.

So what about "stick this post to the top of the post list". Or maybe a shortened version of this?

If theme authors bypass this sticky feature, they must be able to turn it off. Is there an add_theme_support_for_sticky_post function or something like that to turn it off?

[melchoyce]

How about "Always show this post at the top of my blog?"

[haicu]

Better yes!

[Clorith]

I'm not 100% sold, not unlikely scenario: What blog? I use WordPress as a CMS, I don't blog, I post news articles about my company.

I don't have any better suggestions, unfortunately, but it's something I'd love if we could find soem kind of neutral terminology for if at all possible.

[haicu]

How about a more generic phrase like "Always show this post at the top of my post list?"

[mtias]

There doesn't seem to be a consensus on the best way to handle this yet. This will be a center point for the next phases, so it'll have to be approached more holistically then.

If there's a simple copy suggestion that would improve things, let's consider it.

[TeemuSuoranta]

There should also be some way to disable this feature from UI as there are sites that have more complex way of ordering the front page and sticky feature is not used.

MVP: a CSS class to component
The old way has been to remove it with CSS (like here https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/10676/is-there-a-way-to-disable-the-sticky-posts-feature). If the wrapper would have a unique class/ID, we could disable the feature this way. At the moment (WP 5.0) won't include any CSS class that could reliably be set to display: none.

More robust way
The whole sticky option could be made into post type supports feature and label be changed through post type labels.

[adleviton]

Not all websites are blogs. It would be great to have the ability to hide the "Stick to the Front Page" checkbox.

[WPprodigy]

Hmm, it only shows on posts though, not pages.

[adleviton]

True. But not all websites work in the context of being able to stick posts to the front page. So from the client's or end user's perspective, it's just one more thing that can cause confusion and UI clutter.

[pkimbrell38]

How about if you don't want this option to show up at all in the ep editor? For example, some wp sites are multi-author sites and I have been trying to figure out how to make this hidden completely in the wp editor, "Stick to the top of the blog." I have been unable to find a solution anywhere.

[noisysocks]

How about a more generic phrase like "Always show this post at the top of my post list?"

I like this copy. Posts can be displayed in lost of places now that we e.g. have a Query block.

How about if you don't want this option to show up at all in the ep editor? For example, some wp sites are multi-author sites and I have been trying to figure out how to make this hidden completely in the wp editor, "Stick to the top of the blog." I have been unable to find a solution anywhere.

I don't believe there is currently a way to disable this. WordPress Core would have to add this functionality. Please open a ticket in https://core.trac.wordpress.org/newticket.

[Mamaduka]

The wording was updated to Stick to the top of the blog in #13120.

[Mamaduka]

@mor10, can we close this issue?

Screenshot

[mor10]

Looks good to me