Partly based on feedback from:

• ContentOnly Patterns experiment: Add content only inspector fields #71730 (comment)

We need a more prominent way to indicate to the user that they can edit and are editing a pattern.

The experience of patterns introduces a major change. Agency owners and other power users are not used to needing to do an extra click to edit a pattern.

We also need to make it really obvious how to enter/exit the pattern editing mode and access the sidebar, including if someone doesn’t have the sidebar open.

The edit/exit button

One idea was to make edit section button more prominent to indicate to the user that they can edit and are editing a pattern.

This could be via colors and/or adding icons

Here's what it looks like now:

Icons and colors, list view opacity, and document bar text

Editor’s header updates the document bar to reflect the content user is editing. For synced patterns the visual update is bolder as you’re editing the source. #73208

Pattern block in ListView changes to the root block of the pattern user is now in.

See the following mockups:

Pattern	Synced pattern

Expose sidebar functionality/pattern internals

It's not obvious what is editable inside a pattern in content only mode.

Right now the sidebar fields and list view do this work. But they are not guaranteed to be open.

How do we communicate this new editing mode to users?

We might be to add an "Edit section" item or equivalent hint, to the pattern's root block toolbar, or in the canvas itself.