Hi Sarah,

Good account of the struggle behind the scenes. Some people in the WordPress universe, in particular the CEO of Automattic and owner of Audrey Capital, think that WordPress plugin directory should resemble the app store for Android users.

This is of course absolute nonsense. The technical requirements of plugins and WordPress are much higher. Attempting to put self-hosted WordPress into the hands of people neither prepared nor inclined to use technology is just silliness. WordPress.com serves the low maintenance/low skills niche very well (as does Squarespace, or even Tumblr, better not to mention Wix who serves no one well).

Instead, Automattic's Apollo hit team has crippled the plugin directory for those of us who use it every day, agencies, developers, freelancers, plugin developers. Samuel Sidler describes himself as Apollo Team Lead at Automattic and he was the guy leading the very unpopular plugin directory changes.

Watch Apollo Team ignore and suppress feedback on screenshots. Watch Apollo Team ignore and suppress feedback on tabs.

The end result of this comedy will be a backlash from both the pro users and the people being pushed off diving boards which are too high for them.

Thank you Edward Dakin for trying to give us useful stats back! I don't know how we'll ever get our useful plugin directory back.

Search is better but I don't understand why along with simple search which works we can't enjoy an advanced search which allows us to search for different criteria like number of active users, plugin rating, age, last update field or at least some of them.