Earlier this year we started a project to re-create Eclipse Plugin Central. Thanks to the hard work of Nathan Gervais, we are getting very close to making Eclipse Marketplace a reality. In late September, we rolled out a beta of the site and now we would like to get even more feedback from the Eclipse community.
Besides the new design, layout and hosting on a new Drupal content management system there are some new ‘features’ that I’d like to highlight.
1. We have replaced the voting of EPIC with a ‘Favourite’ feature. Users can now ‘favourite the solutions they use or want to track. The solutions that have been favourited by the most people will show-up in a ‘Top Favourites’ category. You can also see what other people have selected as their favourites. Users must also be logged-in to favourite a solution, so no more anonymous voting. Good news is that you can login using an existing Eclipse bugzilla account.
2. We have tried to make navigation much easier. A product can exist in multiple categories, tags are now available for each solution page and [soon to come] user tagging will be enabled.
3. We are using Apache Solr for the search engine. The hope is that this will greatly improve the search capability.
4. p2 has created a new opportunity for Marketplace to make it easier for end-user to install new plugins. We are encouraging all solution provides to publish their update site in their Marketplace listing.
We have also add the ability for individuals to create their own p2 repository that is based on their favourite list. Users can load their Maretplace repo url into Eclipse and then easily keep up to date on the plugins use. Each individual Maretplace repo can also be shared so you can invite others to use what you have selected. For instance here is my repo for my favourites.
Things we still need to add include:
– more work on the home page so it is easier to find the interesting stuff.
– we want to publish an api to the content so other people can use the Maretplace data.
– advanced search still needs a bit of work in terms of layout and usability.
– we need to encourage the solution providers to add their update sites.
– metrics on each solution
Our goal is to make this live by the end of this year. To make this happen we really need your feedback and testing. Give it a try, select some favourites, add new content, let us know what you think at this bugzilla entry.
A word of caution, this is all TEST data so any new data will be deleted before we go live. Thanks for the testing.
