Have you gone to look for a plugin in the official directory and felt like you discovered nothing?
With more than 50 thousand plugins, any search has long since been unhelpful, and it’s almost always better to take advantage of blog plugin lists or recommendations from forums or experts when deciding on one plugin or another.
It is clear that the plugin directory needs improvements, a redesign, whatever, as long as it manages to become useful again.
Same for the lists of featured, popular, etc. Not to mention the penalty for new developers when the list of more recent plugins disappeared.
At the moment, it doesn’t look like there will be any changes, but they could well go in the line of WP Hive, a good example of how the WordPress Plugin directory could (should) be.
Predictive plugin search engine
The most immediate way to use this directory is to look for a plugin by its slug, something that I hope they will change, because it would be more intuitive to do it by name.
Now this is a predictive search engine, but it is showing results.
Results in detail
Once you select a plugin it will initially show you its rating, both on WordPress.org and by WPHive users.
And, as you scroll down the page, a lot of really interesting information, like for example, and the most complete, main checklist.
As you see in the previous screenshot, analyze the impact on the performance of the plugin, if it gives problems programming, compatibility with PHP and WordPress, if you put something in your database, and even if it is updated frequently.
If it finds any error, here is the information.
And, following the page, you can see the statistics of the Plugin.
Its compatibility with software.
And, as I mentioned above, if you add any table or enter data in any table.
Finally, you can take a look at the ratings of WPHive users.
Compare plugins
One of the features missing yes or yes in the official directory is a tool to compare plugins, and WPHive has it.
Just choose them and then see a table-style comparison of their memory consumption, speed and a bunch of other parameters, giving you decision elements.
Discover plugins
But perhaps, the section that I liked most is the one about discovering new plugins.
Just type in the box to discover SEO plugins, administration, images, whatever, within the sections that it offers you.
You can filter the result to your liking, review the ratings and features of each plugin, everything.
Honestly, I don’t know if we will ever have such a directory in WordPress.org but we deserve it, don’t we?
Read this post in Spanish: Cómo debería ser el directorio de plugins de WordPress
