Showcase: add more fields to submission form to be used as filters in showcase later on

[jeherve]

The WordPress Showcase provides some great examples of what you can do with WordPress. When browsing the showcase, one can currently use the "by flavor" sidebar filter to narrow down their search to a platform.

I would like to suggest a different set of filters in that sidebar. When looking at sites on that list, I sometimes wonder "how did they do it?", or "what tools did they use?".

To address this, I'd like to suggest two changes:

1. ​In the Submission form, add a new field that would appear when you pick that you own the site, and where you could provide a list of plugins and / or tools you used to build your site.
2. If we have that information, we could then surface the most popular of those tools in the sidebar, allowing one to get inspiration and better understand how sites are built.

[dufresnesteven]

@jeherve Hey!

Could you provide some examples of what tools you would expect to see there?

[jeherve]

I think it may be interesting to leave this field up to contributors at first, and only surface tools that were mentioned a lot in the filter UI later on. I would expect to see popular plugins like ACF, page builders like Elementor, Block plugins like CoBlocks, theme frameworks like Genesis, popular themes like Divi, ... I am only guessing though, I think seeing what surfaces there may be the really interesting part for folks browsing the showcase, as it would provide inspiration and guidance for people needing some help getting started.

[casiepa]

Replying to jeherve:

I think it may be interesting to leave this field up to contributors at first, and only surface tools that were mentioned a lot in the filter UI later on. I would expect to see popular plugins like ACF, page builders like Elementor, Block plugins like CoBlocks, theme frameworks like Genesis, popular themes like Divi, ... I am only guessing though, I think seeing what surfaces there may be the really interesting part for folks browsing the showcase, as it would provide inspiration and guidance for people needing some help getting started.

@jeherve, would that be a mix of commercial and plugins from w.org/plugins? Or only the ones on the w.org repository? I'm not sure how far we can go with 'promoting' certain plugins in the sidebar.
But I'm fully aligned about having a textbox where the owner could describe and mention the plugins/themes used.

[jeherve]

Replying to casiepa:

would that be a mix of commercial and plugins from w.org/plugins?

That's a great question. My initial thought would be to limit it to plugins from WordPress.org.

That said, this would probably render the showcase a bit less useful. One would not be able to list a potentially critical part of their site setup because it's a paid solution.

I think a good tradeoff would be:

• Version 1: only allow plugins from WordPress.org.
• Version 2: allow third-party plugins, as long as they are GPL.

That version 2 would require human moderation, so that's probably not ideal.