I have just noticed a UI gaffe for which I take full responsibility. In the plugins section of the admin tool, when you go to add new plugins, there is a utility for searching the plugin repository (awesome!) with a button labeled “Search Plugins” to submit the search request.
But! There’s also, in the section for managing plugins, that dorky search box that appears here and there in the admin and allows you to search whatever section you’re in at the time. It, too, has a button labeled “Search Plugins” to submit the search request (not awesome!). Bad UX girl!
In 2.9, I solemnly swear to do something about this. Also the overall clumsiness of the plugins section labeling and navigation. The dorky search box I might not touch, since there’s a GSoC project around extending search that seems cool, and I’ll want to see how that turns out before making changes to the existing search. Ultimately, I’d like to get rid of the section-by-section search box that takes up all that precious h2 real estate and get a blog-wide search going that we can stick in the nav area to search everything at once with the ability to filter results (so you could search posts, comments, tags, etc all at once but choose to see only a subset of results if you only want to see plugins, for example).
