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.
Ian Skerrett 
Congrats Ian and team. It’s a personal joy to me that you’re using the Solr search. Eclipse was one of the first significant open source programs that I came to know and love, and some of my earliest mentors are involved with Eclipse to this day (Boris Bokowski). The fact that the ApacheSolr module is in use and of benefit to the Eclipse community is a matter of deep pride to me, and I feel like I’ve been able to give back to this great project in a meaningful way.
http://marketplace.eclipse.org/search/apachesolr_search/
Cheers,
Robert
Congrats Ian. I’m excited to see the Marketplace launch and the initial p2 integration.
Are there any public future plans for the marketplace?
@Robert Apache Solr is great. Thank you for making it available.
@Chris I’d like to collect feedback on what else people would like to see. One thing I really want to do is have user defined tags. We are collecting feedback at https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=297219
The other major thing is to create a Marketplace client that will be included in Helios. An initial set of requirements are at https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=296131
Any suggestions from you or others would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Ian,
for info, on the home page of eclipse.org, the “plugins” link on the top right still links to EPIC.
Hi Ian.
The marketplace is excellent. Was it built inhouse? I’m looking to have a marketplace developed in Drupal and wondered if you used a certain developer or agency that may be interested/suitable to develop mine. Completely different industry 🙂
Joe, thanks for the feedback. We developed the site inhouse.