Today we released a significant update to the Visual Studio Gallery (visualstudiogallery.com) adding some much needed community features. The latest set of features will help visitors keep up to date on the latest additions to the Visual Studio Gallery and add rich details information about their extension & products.

With the latest update to the site we’ve now added:

• Tons of fixed RSS feeds for everything from the recently added & highest rated extensions to feeds for each of the available categories to see the latest updates in specific types of extensions.
• Tagging support allowing authors to tag extensions and better describe their products to users.
• Dynamic RSS Feeds for each Tag so that any users can subscribe & keep up with new additions.
• Dev Center owners can tag common entries and then suck in the feed on your MSDN page to highlight specific extensions.
  • Ken Levy has this working already on the VSX Dev Center (msdn.com/vsx) landing & community pages.
• Authors can now add details about their extensions using either the WSIWYG or new HTML editor.
• Support for larger thumbnails lets contributors upload images up to 640 x 480.
• Visitors can now click to zoom larger thumbnails to see the full size version.

Last month we added a number of other community features to gallery including:

• User submitted ratings
• Full reviews for providing feedback to the author and other users
• Usefulness ratings for each of the reviews to surface the most valuable reviews
• A cleaned up categories list page that makes it easy for visitors to see scan through details

Please give these features a try and let us know what you think.  We are always taking new suggestions and feedback on the site.