WordPress.org’s contributors are preparing to open the doors of the Pattern Directory to public submissions. Patterns’ transformative effect on page building in the block editor has made the feature important enough to earn its own directory in July 2021. For the past nine months, it has been limited to a small, curated selection of patterns from designers in the community.

Today, Alex Shiels unveiled the new Pattern Creator that will enable public pattern submissions.

“The Pattern Creator page will allow designers and content creators to build, edit, and submit their best block patterns to the directory,” Shiels said. “Approved patterns will be added to the directory, where they will be instantly available to the authors of millions of WordPress sites.”

The Pattern Creator loads an instance of the block editor where the Publish button has been swapped out for a Submit button. Using only WordPress core blocks, pattern designers are encouraged to create something unique that other people might want to use.

Pattern designers are not permitted to upload their own images but the media library is hooked up to Openverse for access to license-free images. After putting all the elements in place for the pattern, designers can select a category, add some keywords for search, and submit the pattern to the directory.

Shiels said the Pattern Creator is expected to officially launch next week but the Meta team is inviting designers and theme developers to help test the submission process now.

With the advent of FSE (full-site editing) in WordPress 5.9, Pattern Directory contributors anticipate pattern authors may soon be submitting more site building type patterns, such as headers, footers, and query blocks. This is also important now that themes have gained the ability to register patterns from directory with theme.json. Contributors are still working on a way to categorize and show “site building” block patterns.

While the Pattern Directory currently has a few simple, artful patterns, it is lacking in variety. Ideally, users would have multiple patterns to choose from when selecting among pricing tables, social cards, contact information, and other frequently used website building blocks. Opening the directory up to public submissions should significantly expand the collection of pre-made design options available to WordPress users in the editor.