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Currently, 94% of users use NetBeans 5.0 or newer, only 6% of users use an older version. The catalog currently shows modules that are very old (2002) and work with very old versions of NetBeans. These are not of interest to the majority of users and only clutter the catalog. I suggest the catalog should by default only show plugins for recent versions of NetBeans (last two?), and to get to plugins for older versions, users would need to use a special switch. Regarding particular UI, my suggestion is that there is a set of checkboxes that the user uses to indicate which version of NetBeans they are interested: [ ] NetBeans 6.0 (Dev) [x] NetBeans 5.5 [x] NetBeans 5.0 [ ] Earlier versions Latest one or two releases would be checked by default. When the user changes their choice, then this should be remembered across sessions (i.e., in the database).
Changing to an enhancement. We decided to NOT make the decision to remove a developer's plugin for the Plugin Portal launch. If the plugin owners decide they want to upgrade or delete the plugin, they will make the decision.
Plugin Portal 2.0 shows by default 10 recently added or updated plugins. In addition to that user can easily select from the pull down menu which NetBeans version s/he is interested in. There are still old plugins in the database but they no longer confuse/slow down users when searching for plugins. I am sure that these changes allow closing this RFE as fixed.