I am very pleased to announce that Eclipse Marketplace is now live.  Thanks to everyone that provided feedback as we rolled out Marketplace.   A big thanks to Nathan Gervias who has done a great job making Marketplace a reality.  The results are fantastic.

When we first started the project we set out the following goals:

• Dramatically increase the usability of through improved navigation and graphic design.
• Make it easier for solution providers to manage their product entries.
• Provide better linkage between EPIC site and the vendors’ update sites.
• Host EPIC on a new content management system.
• Offer benefits to members of the Eclipse Foundation

Marketplace goes a long way to meeting these goals.  Besides being hosted on a modern CMS (Drupal) some of the key features include the following:

- We have introduced the concept of an individual Favorite list.   This is to allow users to keep track of the plugins/product/solutions they want to follow.  We also create a composite p2 repo for each favorite list, so it helps users find the relevant update sites.

- In the era of crowd-sourcing, we wanted to find a way to show what are the more popular solutions and allow people to share their favorite lists.   Therefore,  we have a created  Top Favorite lists and enabled the ability tp explore other people favorite lists.  User can also share the url to their favorite list, ex. here is mine.

- Search is also dramatically improved.  Now, i you are a long-time EPIC user you might say ‘the bar was low’  .  Marketplace uses Apache Solr for search and filtering.   It is now a lot easier to refine your search criteria based on license type, product maturity and category.

- One thing that always bugged me about EPIC is that plugins could only be in one category.   Now, plugins can be in multiple categories and you use tags to navigate between categories.  In the future we plan to add user defined tagging and a tag cloud.

- Users  can now use Eclipse Bugzilla accounts to login to Marketplace.  No one needs yet another username/password to remember, so you can now reuse your existing Bugzilla account.

We plan to continue to add new features to Marketplac e in 2010.  Let us know what you think and what you would like to see added.

From http://ianskerrett.wordpress.com