You will now notice a new section added to the WordPress Plugin Repo and it’s called Block-Enabled Plugins. The section is for all the Gutenberg-related free WordPress plugins.
WordPress 5.0 has been downloaded more than 8 million times in just a week after its official release on December 6, 2018. The 5.0 version introduced the Gutenberg editor as the default editor and it is believed that users are searching for blocks to extend the new editing experience.
In the new block-enabled plugins section, there are currently more than 90 blocks. Samuel (Otto) has invited developers to email the plugins team at [email protected] if they have a block-enabled plugin and want them to be included in the section. Plugins that introduce or improve blocks in any way are welcomed for submission.
According to Otto, the plugins team is curating the submitted plugins list manually and adding those that they think are good or interesting.
In the 9 priorities that Matt Mullenweg introduced, it included one saying “building a WordPress.org directory for discovering blocks, and a way to seamlessly install them”. So, we can expect a directory solely dedicated to the blocks in the future.
The WordPress.org team will soon be introducing the similar type of block-enabled section for free WordPress themes in WordPress Theme Repo as well.
There sure are an infinite number of unknowns in the block era and slowly yet steadily everything will fall in place. So, for now, the newly introduced block-enabled plugins section will continue to expand as more users adopt the new Gutenberg editor.
The development process of Gutenberg phase 2 has already begun and now it’s focusing more on the site customization and the entire site layouts. Know more about the Gutenberg phase two.