Opened 11 months ago
Last modified 6 months ago
#49487 new enhancement
Remove the "Featured" tab in the Add Themes screen
| Reported by: |
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Owned by: | |
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| Milestone: | Awaiting Review | Priority: | normal |
| Severity: | normal | Version: | |
| Component: | Themes | Keywords: | needs-patch |
| Focuses: | Cc: |
Description
Followup to 5044 (Meta) / 9522 (Commit)
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. Instead, the featured list is just randomly generated. This does not quite fulfill the screen's purpose.
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 (Meta) for example).
Until consensus arrives on an approach for that, we should disable the featured tab.
As noted above, this the Meta ticket for this has already been completed, and this change just needs to be carried through to the Add Themes page.
The theme browser in the customizer prototypes an alternative interface that prioritizes filtering and search over the older tabbed approach, defaulting to latest themes. The featured, popular, latest, and favorites tabs do not exist on the premise that they don't actually help users. I don't know if any stats are available to validate that this approach is better, but it's been in core since WordPress 4.9.
Rather than only removing the featured tab I proposed syncing the customizer interface into wp-admin, or even merging these into the single newer interface in the customizer. The customizer integrates theme browsing into the live preview workflow more seamlessly than wp-admin, using live site previews instead of the .org preview.