The auto-hiding drawer was the wrong model — a list you navigate by shouldn't appear
and disappear under the pointer, and its vertical text tab read as a stray artifact.
Replaced with a persistent side panel following the Planner reference:
- Collapse toggle at the top (the panel glyph, arrow flips), remembered across visits.
Collapsed leaves a 56px icon rail where the coloured package badges are still
clickable, rather than hiding the list entirely.
- One primary action: "+ New work package" with a split caret for Duplicate, Split by
discipline and Export all.
- Icon nav with counts: My packages (owned by you), All packages, Needs attention
(on hold or not release-ready), Dashboard. These filter the list below.
- Packages as rows with a colour-coded initial badge, number, subject and readiness
state, still grouped by status, with a left accent bar on the current package.
The badge colour is hashed from the WP number, so a package keeps its swatch
instead of shuffling when another is added or deleted.
- The panel sits IN the layout: the form and the full-width chrome shift beside it
rather than being overlaid.
Also, the reason it appeared as loose unstyled widgets in the middle of the form: the
panel's markup and its stylesheet are cached independently, so a browser can run new
markup against old CSS. Its essential layout (fixed position, width, the row/badge
flex, the collapsed rules) is now injected by wp-creation-app.js as a floor, inserted
first in <head> so the stylesheet still wins on everything it defines. Same lesson as
the iframe: a component whose CSS-missing state is "broken" rather than "plain" must
carry its own critical layout.
Verified with 25 driven checks in headless Chrome: persistence, the four nav links,
badge colours and text, view filtering, collapse/expand, the split menu, row selection
and highlighting — and, with wp-creation-styles.css removed from the page entirely, the
panel is still a fixed 288px side panel with the form shifted beside it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
n.siegfried
917a728399
