Plugins: Considerations for future homepage redesigns

[ndiego]

These issues were ported over from WordPress Slack.

category tabs: the only category options are "all" "community" and "commercial". and even as a plugin owner myself, those didn't really make sense to me. does it mean that a commercial plugin is not for the community?

• i wish the tabs said something different. although i'm not sure what they should be. maybe some version of "free", "premium add-ons available" and "only works with commercial saas". i know these are not realistic as they're way too long, but those seem more aligned with the business models that exist.
• in addition, i don't think those categories are the first thing a standard user would care about. they are there to look for something specific for their site. with that in mind, i wish there were categories based on function. e.g. "page builder" "ecommerce" "memberships" "newsletters" "form builder" etc.

block-enabled plugins section: the first section beneath the search bar and tabs is a section called "block-enabled plugins". this feels a little putting the cart before the horse. a user wouldn't first look for block-enabled plugins, and then look for the features they need. instead, they would look for a plugin that has the features they need, and then look to see if it's block-enabled. so having categories based on function, with maybe a label that says "block-enabled" feels like it would be more in line with a user's discovery journey.

• i think having "popular plugins" or even "featured plugins" as the first section might be more useful for browsing. i daresay, you could keep the block-enabled plugins and simply rename it "featured plugins" in order to have your cake and eat it too.

While the most recent Plugin Directory refresh did not fundamentally change the homepage, these point should be considered for future redesigns.

For the category tabs, the Community and Commercial designations are defined according to this Make post, but it's not obvious to most site visitors what this means. I agree that we need more plugin segmentation/categories.