Plugins have been getting bigger and bigger and more complex.
It would be really nice if we could have grouped Site Settings with Headings, much like we’ve had in Categories (ie Category Settings) for a long time.
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That would be awesome in improving user experience in readability and usability. 
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+1 for this. Something I had dreamed a long time.
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That’d be simply awesome !!! 
Perhaps this has been kept reserved by the discourse team for the next big Whole Number Version (upgrade). [But till then we all should be obliged to hide the fact how lost we feel in this jungle of discourse settings 
]
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This is definitely something we have been thinking about for some time under the staff-experience umbrella, I am tech lead on this team working alongside @tobiaseigen as PM.
It’s especially something we want for the AI plugin, which has a lot of settings. We are gradually updating plugins with custom UIs to follow our new UI guidelines, which puts the Settings tab within the plugin configuration area for easier access as a first step:
We are also starting to roll out the concept of what we are calling “config areas” to the admin UI, which will group site settings and other configuration in one place to reduce the need to hunt around in the giant /admin/site_settings list.
A good example of this is our new About config area:
You can see how everything is grouped into logical cards, and most of the inputs on this page are site settings in the background. We will also have a way to reset these settings individually to default as we do on the existing settings page, and the staff action logs are still created in the background.
This is a lot of words to say – we agree with the premise of the OP, we will get to it eventually, however we are choosing to focus more on these config areas and getting plugin UIs consistent for now.
I will ask though, which plugins do you think needs this type of setting grouping the most (apart from AI)?
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My proposal was triggered by my experience making Discourse Chatbot 🤖 (Now smarter than ChatGPT!*)
There have to be generic improvements that can be made without having to resort to making bespoke administrative interfaces for individual plugins.
One of those improvements would be to allow grouping of settings at a sub-plugin level so they can be ordered and laid out in a much more friendly and logical manner.
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Thanks, Robert! This is helpful. As Martin writes, we are already working on grouping settings. We’re going to need it not just for plugins but core features as well that have lots of settings.
Would you be up for sharing a mockup of how you’d imagine this might look, using your own plugin as an example? You and Martin could also spitball here on how it might work in the code. For instance, would you want each grouping to have a description or explanation? Would you want to be able to choose the order in which groupings are listed? Is it just the need for grouping settings you want or are there other limitations/problems you are bumping into when creating the admin UI for your plugins? What feedback are you getting from users of your plugins about setting them up?
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Be more than delighted to provide that input.
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