Site Assembler - Featured patterns review and update

[miksansegundo]

What

Review the reasons to feature patterns in the assembler and the editor and decide if they should be updated programmatically or manually once every week.

Why

Users will probably explore this category first because appears on the first position in the list of categories.

They list of patterns in the featured category are static. Why are these patterns featured?

How

Make dynamic the featured patterns by updating them programmatically or manually.

• Manually once every week
  • Will Ola decide which patterns should be added/removed from the featured category?
  • After clearing the patterns cache, the changes will appear in the editor and the assembler.
• Programmatically
  • Decide the strategy - Which strategy do we want?
    • Maybe randomly pick one or two patterns from each category?
  • If we only want to update the featured patterns on the assembler, it could be easily done from the front-end because we have the whole list of patterns indexed and we can control which patterns are shown in the featured category.
  • If we want to update them in the editor too, we could create a script to recategorize them and run it periodically using a cron every week.

[autumnfjeld]

As a precursor to this, let's hide/remove the featured category because it is currently stale and not really serving the purpose of "Featured" or "Best of". See slack discussion: p1681802119464299/1681325885.219489-slack-C048CUFRGFQ

[richtabor]

A bit of context on the theme front. It's not abnormal for folks to place a theme's more interesting patterns into the "Featured" category. In the context of the Assembler I probably wouldn't have any classified as featured.

For dotOrg context, the Pattern Directory marks some patterns as featured, which are then available within the Pattern Inserter's Featured category. Though I'm thinking the featured category should probably be more local (either theme, or plugin, etc) — instead of a holistic "I see this same pattern front-and-center on every WP install" approach.

[miksansegundo]

Thanks for sharing that context. Here is the current status of the featured category:

• in the editor:
  • we don't feature patterns from the Dotcom library.
  • we still feature patterns coming from themes and plugins, as it worked before.
• in the assembler:
  • we don't feature any patterns