Remove the "Featured" tab in the theme directory

[kjellr]

The Featured tab of the theme repository is the first page that users visit when looking for themes. As such, it should ideally present them with the best of the best WordPress themes. Istead, the featured list is just randomly generated, so it's not quite fulfilling its purpose.

​https://wordpress.org/themes/browse/featured/

There have been discussions around replacing this with some sort of actual curated list, or an algorithmically chosen set based on how new and popular a theme is (as proposed in #3750 for example).

Until consensus arrives on an approach for that, we should turn off the featured tab entirely.

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Note: I tried to grab a screenshot of this for this ticket, but unfortunately the whole page is just showing a "No themes found" message at the moment: ​http://cloudup.com/cFukrbHxA5L

[acosmin]

Maybe give #3750 another chance :)

[Otto42]

The featured themes and tab are part of the WordPress core. It cannot be "turned off" without changing core, APIs, etc.

So, while it might be hidden from the display on WordPress.org, but that isn't where most people see the featured themes anyway, they see it in their wp-admin screens.

So, marking as maybelater for now. The featured themes aren't going away anytime soon without a much greater range of changes than fits into a mere meta ticket. A better idea would get the themes team to figure out how to curate it properly.

[kjellr]

The featured themes and tab are part of the WordPress core. It cannot be "turned off" without changing core, APIs, etc.

We should do that as well. I was just about to open a core ticket for that aspect of this work too. Any curation is not going to happen soon, so turning this off in the meantime is an improvement.

[dd32]

In 9522:

Theme Directory: Remove the 100% randomised "featured" view from WordPress.org, promoting the Popular view to be the default.

The API endpoint should continue to work to service requests from WordPress installs, where the featured tab is still the default.
This change is intended to be temporary, with a properly curated featured listing to replace it at some point.

Fixes #5044.

[dd32]

In 9523:

Theme Directory: Bump scripts after [9522].

See #5044.

[Cenay]

Just adding my two cents worth.

I think the default link should be ​https://wordpress.org/themes/search/featured/ -- not the ./themes/browse/featured/ link.

​https://wordpress.org/themes/search/featured/ gives us the themes which are marked featured.

[dd32]

In 9535:

Theme Directory: Redirect /themes/browse/featured to the homepage temporarily as we had incorrectly set it as the Canonical URL for the Theme directory.

See #5044.
Fixes #5048.