Hi @levon
Thanks for the great reply and insight. About the tags plugin, it actually may have been a mistake on my part to bring that up in this discussion, because, as you say, the feature I requested wasn’t really a “standard” one, it was a very specific one that I happened to need. I thought the dialogue would add some background to the discussion, but it may have had the opposite effect and made my point confusing. To be fair, any change you’d decide to do from my request would be more than I should be able to expect, and changes like that would be completely fair to expect payment for.
The last part of your reply hits exactly what I was thinking though:
Overall, we got more experienced in building plugins, and if at first we tried to build the full UI with functitonality, now we build the plugin so that users can build the UI in Bubble and then use plugin actions for the functionality.
For example insttead of building an audio player with fixed number of design skins, we have not built an audio player which is completely composed of plugin actions and the user can make their own design with standard Bubble elements.
What you said here summed up my thoughts better than I was able to. Plugins that allow you to design your own solutions on top of a set of features are infinitely more flexible than a fixed number of skins (no matter how awesome they look), and after all, you can still set up templates for download/purchase in addition to the plugin, for those who want a completely designed product. The separation of features and themes are a very interesting idea.
About doing the checklist and finding a set of best practices, would you be willing to make that a public discussion? I think a common set of best practices that all plugin developers can use as guidelines would really benefit Bubble as a whole. I’d be happy to contribute what I can from a buyer’s perspective.
Perhaps @eve or someone else from the Bubble team have an interest in following this too, and maybe we can end up with something that becomes part of the plugin development documentation.
Lastly, as @melon said, and I have stated in other threads, my point is not to chime a red alert on the state of the plugin store. On the contrary, I think it has developed in a great direction and several plugins and developers have been indispensable in my daily work. But a good thing can always be made even better 