Custom Categories for Building Blocks in the Marketplace | Feature Requests

Custom Categories for Building Blocks in the Marketplace

Franziska Henkel

With the growing number of available Building Blocks in the meshStack Marketplace, it becomes increasingly difficult for users to browse, discover, and understand which Building Blocks are relevant for their use case.

As a Marketplace user, I want a more structured and user-friendly overview of available Building Blocks, so that I can quickly identify relevant Building Blocks, understand logical groupings, and discover related or dependent offerings more easily.

To improve usability, the Marketplace should allow Building Blocks to be grouped into custom categories or sections with configurable headings, similar to the existing “Featured” section at the top of the Building Block list. This would allow Marketplace administrators to group Building Blocks in a way that reflects their internal service portfolio, dependencies, or user journeys.

Marketplace administrators should be able to:

Create custom categories for Building Blocks
Define a custom heading for each category
Assign one or multiple Building Blocks to a category
Control the display order of categories
Optionally group dependent or related Building Blocks together
Optionally control the display order of Building Blocks within each category

July 1, 2026

Jelle den Burger

Thanks for the feature request Franziska Henkel, I totally understand this need once you get a large number of Building Block Definitions.
We do have tags on Building Block Definitions where you can filter on, which could kind of do what you want, but sadly they are not visible directly on the main page, but only when opening a single Building Block Definition. See the screenshot below. Have you considered using this?
Also one more related question: what do you think of the idea of popularity sorting? I at least would find that a better way of sorting this list rather than a simple A->Z sorting.

Franziska Henkel

Hi Jelle den Burger, I will definitely look into if we can incorporate the tags as a step in this direction. 
However the feedback from our users tells us that they are not aware what Building Blocks exist let alone would know what to filter for. I would like to make the Marketplace more approachable for them to increase Building Block usage. At the moment the overview page is too overwhelming to browse, especially as the more granular, technical resource Building Blocks are mixed in with the more recognizable ones.
I'm not sure sorting by popularity would solve this particular problem, depending on how the popularity is measured.

Janny the AI Product Manager

Thanks for taking the time to write this up — this is super clear and thoughtfully scoped. A structured Marketplace view with admin-defined categories (and ordering) makes a lot of sense as the number of Building Blocks grows, especially for guiding users through portfolios and dependencies.
We’ll share this with the team. Quick clarifiers to make sure we understand the ideal behavior:
1) Should a Building Block be allowed to appear in multiple categories, or exactly one?
2) Do you envision categories being visible to all Marketplace users, or should visibility be configurable (e.g., by tenant/project/user group)?
3) For dependencies/related blocks: would you prefer a simple “grouped in same category” approach, or explicit “related/dependent” links shown on the Building Block card/details?
If you have an example of how you’d structure categories (even a short list of headings + a few blocks under each), that would be really helpful.

Franziska Henkel

Hi Janny the AI Product Manager,

1) Should a Building Block be allowed to appear in multiple categories, or exactly one?

-> multiple categories, if possible

2) Do you envision categories being visible to all Marketplace users, or should visibility be configurable (e.g., by tenant/project/user group)?

-> visibility to all Marketplace users would be sufficient

3) For dependencies/related blocks: would you prefer a simple “grouped in same category” approach, or explicit “related/dependent” links shown on the Building Block card/details?

-> optionally, a "related/dependent" hint would be helpful

If you have an example of how you’d structure categories (even a short list of headings + a few blocks under each), that would be really helpful.

-> Example:

Cloud Foundation Services

Azure Subscription
Resource Group

Network & Connectivity

Virtual Network
NSG Rule
DNS Zone Connection
Firewall Rule Request

Compute

Virtual Machine Linux
Virtual Machine Windows
Managed Disk
VM Monitoring Extension
VM Backup Extension

Identity & Access Management

Service Principal
Role Assignment

DevOps & Automation

Azure DevOps Project
Git Repository
Service Connection
Terraform State Storage

Cost Management & Governance

Budget Creation
Budget Alert

...

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