Dear friends, as you might have already noticed, we just published a significantly redesigned Marketplace home page as well as the plugin and theme detail pages. With this update we hope to achieve two goals: simplifying the task of finding products by website visitors, and creating fair competition for authors.

Reorganized plugin lists

The Plugins page now has sections that display the most popular paid and free plugins. Also, the page displays new plugins and an Editor's Choice list.

We also added more sorting options - last updated, rating, popularity for all time, for the last 7 days and for the last 30 days. The home page has links to the corresponding lists, for example there's a "Paid Popular for 7 days" link above the Top Paid plugin list.

Each plugin in the lists now has a small badge displaying its position in the Top list. Badges of top 6 plugins are highlighted. The Top lists are ordered by the Popularity.

The popularity is calculated based on the number of projects a plugin was added to. The equation takes into account how long ago a plugin or theme was added to a project. More recent additions have more weight. A plugin that was added to 10 projects a week ago will be less popular than a plugin that was added to 10 projects today. This creates fair competition for products regardless of whether they are new or old. If a plugin performs well, it has a chance to be number 1 in the Top List and appear on the Plugins home page.

Updates in the screenshots

The rules for plugin screenshot dimensions are more strict now. The screenshot ratio should be 1.33, for example 838x630px. The allowable screenshot width is between 838px and 1200px.

If you have difficulties with taking screenshots, please consider using a browser extension that allows setting specific browser dimensions.

Also, the theme and plugin pages will display a maximum of 5 screenshots. We made this update to encourage authors to include only meaningful images that are really relevant to their products.

Currently we left all screenshots as is, but we will hide all screenshots that do not comply with these new guidelines in one month, on June 15. Please update screenshots of your plugins.

Banners

Plugins and themes now support the use of Banners. A banner, if provided, will be displayed on the product details page, above the product description. Quality banners draw more attention to your products and help set them apart.

Leaderboard

The Leaderboard displays all plugins, themes and authors ordered by their popularity. You can locate yourself or your product in the lists and see where you are positioned in relation to other authors. We hope this inspires you to try to get to the top with making great products!

More updates are coming

We have many more ideas and plans of improving the Marketplace. In the nearest feature we will publish updates to the voting and reviewing systems that should collect more feedback from customers. Some changes in the Account / Author pages are pending as well. Those changes will address the product management usability issues.

Thanks for reading and for supporting OctoberCMS!