Great and useful plugin, let down by horrific UI

This plugin is awesome for setting load order and choosing which plugins get loaded in certain scenarios.

However, the UI is absolutely terrible – very confusing, unreliable and particularly difficult to work with.

IMHO the groups functionality should be removed completely, and replaced with a hierarchical drag-and-drop interface using same UI as the menu editor….

Each plugin would be represented by a panel showing plugin name, version and some basic links: Activate | Delete or Deactivate, Edit. Update link would be shown when applicable (and panel colour could change to make it really obvious that update is needed). There would be a small arrow that when clicked would expand the panel to show other info such as description, author, link to website, etc. An “always load” checkbox would also be displayed on the extended panel – when ticked, that plugin will always load no matter what other settings I make (so long as it is activated). There would be a +/- button on plugins that have child plugins so I could expand/collapse parts of the hierarchy to make it easier to work with. At the top of the page would be a search box allowing realtime filtering of the plugin list using jQuery.

This would allow me to create a hierarchical tree of both dependencies (ie. all BuddyPress addons would be children of the main BuddyPress plugin) and load order (vertical ordering of items). It would allow me to drag an entire group to a different location in the tree (eg. I could drag the main BuddyPress plugin and all it’s children would go with it).

Then, a new “Profiles” option in the Plugins menu would allow me to create profiles. Each profile would display the full plugin hierarchy and allow me to tick which plugins should be loaded by that profile. When a plugin is ticked, any parent plugins are also automatically ticked. Within the profile there would be a conditions editor which would allow me to add one or more conditions where that profile will override the plugins that get loaded (using a similar approach to the “Content Aware Sidebars” plugin).

(EDIT: Just spotted the Plugin Filters menu after doing a page refresh in admin area. That’s also very confusing.)