The TeX Users Group branch of the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network http://tug.ctan.org has a new web interface.
When you visit you will notice a new look, including a wonderful drawing by Duane Bibby. You will also notice an improved organization: directory browsing now includes more information about packages, an introduction for newbies to TeX is right up front, and there is a way to search all package documentation.
Many more features will come online in the future. For example, we will have a keyword search of packages, but as yet the packages do not have keywords, so that search is disabled for the moment. Another example is that we will have a more sophisticated upload facility, that for one thing allows authors to enter keywords for their package. There are also some incomplete links, etc. We are working on these features, but rather than wait longer, now is the right time to bring this new system online -- for one thing, the functioning features are already an improvement over what was there.
These improvements would not be possible without the support of the user groups, including Dante's travel support for three maintainer's meetings and TUG's purchase of a new site machine with increased power. We gratefully acknowledge that without this support by user groups, this development would not have happened.
No doubt people will find bugs, and have comments and feature requests. In particular, the first few days might be rocky :-} We apologize for shortcomings and thank you for your patience. We have set up a mailing list for discussion of this project; see https://lists.dante.de/mailman/listinfo/ctanweb/ . Because archives of this list are available for public viewing you can see if there has already been a discussion of the point.
Finally, note that the web interface to other two CTAN core nodes http://www.cam.ctan.org and http://dante.ctan.org/ remain stable throughout this change. Also stable are the FTP and rsync interfaces to all three sites, and of course all of our mirrors.
Thank you, Jim Hefferon, for the CTAN team