WordPress Plugin Directory – WordPress Relaunches Plugin Directory with New Design

WordPress new Plugin Directory is live now. Contributors have been working for the past year on rebuilding the directory with a new design and better capabilities for searching through the 45K+ available plugins.

The new landing page displays a search bar prominently at the top, followed by sections for featured plugins, popular WordPress Plugins, and beta plugins.

The design changes to the individual plugin pages have received mixed feedback.

Header Banner

With latest design, plugin header images appear to be stretched now with the new wider content area, but this may encourage developers to update their listings.

Description section

New design of Description section is not looking so good. Little bit cultured with font size etc, but many are not fond of how the new single plugin display ditches the previous tabbed interface in favor of truncated sections with numerous “read more” links. This requires the visitor to click and scroll repeatedly through a massive wall of text. The experience of doing this to find information is much less efficient than the previous tabbed UI.

Installation

Installation section is missing from the main screen and added under FAQ.

Screenshots and FAQ

The screenshots slider and FAQ accordion UI are welcome improvements.

Plugin Stats

Plugin Stats are moved under Advanced View link.

The plugin directory is now powered by WordPress, instead of bbPress, making it easier for plugin developers and reviewers to manage plugins, tags/categories, and committers. The submission and review process has also been streamlined so the plugin team will no longer reject plugins after 7 days. They also have to ability to rename plugin slugs prior to approval for easier handling of typos.

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