How complete is this blocks catalogue?

I estimate that the WordPress Blocks reference is 37.5% complete!

Herb Miller, October 2019.

I’m about 3/8ths of the way through the first pass of cataloguing existing WordPress blocks.

This post shows how I came to that figure, and what I intend to do next.

How many plugins?

  • Back in June, Gutenberg times listed 98 plugins for the new WordPress editor.
  • WordPress.org’s curated list of plugins that offer blocks for the block-based editor is 403 plugins long.
  • At the time of writing this post, the development version of this website catalogues blocks for 47 plugins.
  • From a list of over 53,000 plugins, I identified 551 plugins that would appear to deliver Gutenberg blocks… based on the plugin name and keywords.
  • Checking each plugin for a Blocks section reduced this to 206 plugins with at least one block.
  • This suggests that some of the plugins on the curated list haven’t been scanned properly / recently.
  • I don’t know which of them need rescanning.

My figure for the total number of plugins to catalogue is therefore somewhere between 206 and 403.

How many blocks?

Current status

At the time of writing this post I’ve catalogued:

Theoretically the blocks in Core, Jetpack, WooCommerce and WordPress SEO are included in the blocks subdomain.

How many to do?

  • So that’s 333 blocks already catalogued.
  • The total number of blocks in the subset of 206 is 791.
  • But for some plugins the number of blocks listed by wordpress.org is quite different from the number I’ve already catalogued.
  • I’ve already documented 231 blocks for the matching set of plugins.
  • So let’s just estimate that I’ve got another 500 or so to do.
  • 54 of them in cosmic-blocks alone!

Action plan

Which of these actions should I take to make the catalogue more useful?

  1. Increase the percentage complete
  2. Improve the discovery process

Increase the percentage complete

What would be the best way of achieving this?

  1. Go for the low hanging fruit; pick off the plugins that deliver just one block.
  2. Go for the biggies in terms of blocks delivered.
  3. Go for the biggies in terms of total downloads.
  4. Pick the plugins that have the most unique sounding blocks.

Improve the discovery process

What would be the best way of achieving this?

  1. Provide tag clouds for taxonomy terms.
  2. Provide archive listings for taxonomies.
  3. Implement better pagination.
  4. Record videos for each block.

I think I’ll try a combination of the above; Trying items 1. and 4. for increasing the percentage complete and 1. for the discovery process.

Why don’t you let me know what you think?

@herb_miller

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