Add categories to the "New Page" pattern modal

[simison]

What problem does this address?

As implemented previously, when registering patterns with 'blockTypes' => array( 'core/post-content' ) annotation, they appear in a modal when creating a new page:

The small modal becomes unwieldly very quickly when a theme or plugin registers dozens of patterns:

Screen.Recording.2022-12-13.at.12.50.08.mov

What is your proposed solution?

• Add possibility to add categories.
• Increase the modal size to (almost) full browser size to accommodate categories and, be able to see patterns better
• Add search input. When it makes sense to add lots of patterns, it makes sense to let search them, too.

Basically re-use already existing "Explore all patterns" modal. That seemed to be intention in the original issue as well.

Categories could be pulled from existing categories key, without needing to introduce new APIs.

[annezazu]

Tagging in @WordPress/gutenberg-design on this one too :)

[paaljoachim]

Thank you for sharing @simison and @annezazu !
Sounds like a very good idea to me!
As a bigger modal will give more space to the explorations of the current patterns being looked at.

[jasmussen]

Proposed solution of using existing "Explore all" sounds good.

I think there's still an opportunity for further unification at a later time. We have a couple of very adjacent modals:

• This one
• Explore all patterns
• Choose a starting pattern when adding a new page
• Choose a starting pattern when creating a new template

All of those could be considered as part of a whole, and look and behave similarly.

[jameskoster]

Re unification, I just wanted to point to issue #39308 which has some designs for that. They probably need some polishing, but I'm sharing here in case we want to implement any of those ideas.

[paaljoachim]

There is a PR here which addresses the modal size and is associated to this issue:
#49722

[simison]

@jameskoster @jasmussen I was looking at new page modal and while it looks great, it still feels like category-list would be very helpful for sites with lots of patterns?

[jameskoster]

I'm wondering whether this modal could be updated to utilise the data view work and make use of all the associated features (search/filtering, view options, pagination, etc). That would allow users to filter by category, and anything else deemed useful.