Make it easier to find community plugins (organize community plugins by function/tags)

Use case or problem

I am very glad that so many community plugins have been released recently. However, it is becoming more difficult to find plugins that have the features I want or that are actively being updated. I would like developers to add features to make it easier to find plugins.

Proposed solution

Some ideas:

  • Sort community plugins by update date
    • We would like to be able to sort the plugin list by update date in order to find plugins that are still actively being updated.
  • Tagging
    • I don’t know if developer tagging or user tagging would be better, but tags for plugin attributes such as ‘daily notes’, ‘hotkeys’, ‘tables’, etc. would make it easier to find plugins. Maybe a tag like “Most downloaded in June 2022” would be nice.
  • Community Plugin category in the forum
    • This is not about Obsidian program itself. Currently, threads about specific plugins in the official forum are mainly in the Share & showcase category, but they are also distributed among Feature Requests and Plugin Ideas. It would be easier to consolidate information if we create “Community Plugin” category and have one thread per plugin (or multiple threads for complex plugins) there.
11 Likes

I don’t personally need to sort by update date — normally there are only a few candidates for whatever need I’m trying to fill — but I’d like to see the update date in the plugin listings.

I’m not sure tags would add much over the existing descriptions. Most plugins I’ve seen include a long description, and the plugin search reads those descriptions.

I would like to see the Community Plugin category, but definitely not with one thread per plugin — that makes it hard to scan for info (already a problem in Share & Showcase). Maybe Community Plugins should be Community Plugins & Themes, as I’ve seen some very long threads about themes in Share & Showcase.

2 Likes

I think https://obsidian-plugin-stats.vercel.app/ has everything you requested.

7 Likes

@CawlinTeffid
Yes, even without the sorting function, just showing the update date would be helpful. Community Plugins & Themes might be more appropriate, as some plugins are closely related to CSS themes.

@Denna
Thank you for telling me excellent site! I still think it would be beneficial to add such features to Obsidian, but that site would be a great help to me in my search for plugins.

1 Like

I agree, I was also just looking for a ‘recently updated’ option in Obsidian itself. This website is nice, but don’t see why we shouldn’t have it in Obsidian itself either

Use case or problem

Looking for useful plugins has become easier with sorting options but…

There are still far too many to keep track of.

Updates, new plugins, outdated plugins, duplicate plugins, and new user overload.

Proposed solution

Add something like VS code has…

  • Recommended plugin section
  • Filter options:
    image
  • Plugin viewing options:
    image
  • A rating system

Related feature requests

Please make it easier to find community plugins
Hide unwanted plugins from community plugins list

2 Likes

There are now 600+ community plugins, and we may know that we’ll never use some of them for some reason:

  • no more maintained by author
  • a newer plugin does a better job
  • too specific for our usage

So I think it would improve QoL if we could exclude the community plugins we don’t want to see anymore in the list.
It may be a core feature, but a plugin could probably do the job.
What do you think?

6 Likes

Stars :star::star::star::star::star: and categories

Use case or problem

The number of plugins available is increasing, which is a good thing. However, the number of downloads does not always reflect a plugin's utility or quality in practice.

Proposed solution

To address this, I propose implementing a system of 5-star ratings to better reflect a plugin's quality. Additionally, categories could also be implemented to further organize plugins, but this would require more thought and consideration.
3 Likes

And you do some pushes and you have no answer.

And having the date of publication of the plugin could be useful

I often go to find interesting and new plugins, but when I browse the Community Plugin Market, I found that there is no option to sort by recently most downloaded. I think it would be useful for new plugins

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I will love a tag system!

2 Likes

Use case or problem

There are lots of community plugins in Obsidian now (It is 1077 now.). When you wanna search a plugin for not specific one, I mean, you wanna explore the plugins. You simply lost yourself.

Proposed solution

By tagging the community plugins like “AI, front-matter, auto complete, theming, utilty, metadata etc.”.

3 Likes

I agree. A rating and review system will be a major improvement in addition to sort by date first published or last updated. It would also open another channel for feedback about a plugin other than opening a GitHub issue which most users may not do.

Now that I think of it, implementing a rating system would require an account of some kind to track who gave the rating or wrote the review. And since Obsidian itself needs no account, this would be tricky. Maybe Obsidian Forum account can be used to track the ratings and reviews.

I found another post requesting such a feature but it was incorrectly posted to the plugin ideas category: Have a simple review system for plugins

1 Like

Greetings everyone,

All credit to the author for sparking this discussion.

We collectively recognize the growing importance of community plugins. Their popularity is undeniable, and their use is expected to increase in the coming times.

The following suggestions resonate with my perspective.

Plugin Discovery:

A sort-by-update feature would be highly beneficial, as plugins not updated for 6 months could potentially pose security concerns.

Proposed Category: Community Plugins

It’s evident that a dedicated category would greatly assist in locating specific plugins. Currently, information on certain plugins can be hard to come by.

Best regards,
b.

An similar point is to filter them. Buggy and unmaintained plugins waste the time and frustrate the user.

Last updated, works, works not with …, works on android, Windows, …, latest release numbers and dates, needs …, alpha, beta, number of open issues, number of current users, sends content to KI, … are some of the criteria, one needs to make a decision.

With the number of plugins growing all the time (as of today, approaching 1000), it would be really helpful to be able to sort them according to tags.

Use case or problem

There’s no easy way to search for all plugins in a particular area if the plugin title and/or short description doesn’t contain distinctive keywords, e.g. it’s not easy to find all plugins that integrate AI. Similarly, searching for “spaced repetition” will only bring up plugins that actually use those words, and you won’t find various flashcard plugins. Thus, it would be helpful to be able for developers to be able to tag their plugins accordingly.

Proposed solution

Create a tags field to allow developers to tag their plugins. Some suggestions might be “#ai”, “#integrations”, “#interface”, “#spacedRepetition”, “#metadata”, “#appearance

Tags could also be used to mark plugin statuses, e.g. “#sherlocked” or “#inactive

Current workaround (optional)

No current workaround that I can think of. I suppose developers could add hashtags to their short descriptions, so searching “#” would de facto be a tag search.

8 Likes

YES, I was just thinking about this last night! There should be a way a categorize and filter plugins.

Some other categories I can think of right now that could be useful:

  • linking
  • organization/file management
  • metadata
  • customization
  • editing
  • automation
  • integration
  • programming
  • writing
  • AI (the number of these in particular are growing pretty fast.)

Right now, I mostly search for plugins here or on Github because of the current in-app plugin search limitations.

2 Likes

I think this would be useful, too.

Surfacing the right plugins is very difficult.

I think it might useful to combine both a controlled vocabulary of categories or tags to start (maybe hierarchically organized; and plugins may belong to multiple categories). Because then we just defer the problem from “I don’t know what text to search for” to “I don’t know what tags to search for” :slight_smile:

An official “taxonomy” of plugin categoriess can be augmented with a “bottom-up” one where contributors add additional tags to capture applications/aspects.

3 Likes

Yes, I agree totally. Thanks!