I fully agree we should not have "What's new" scattered throughout the gallery. Moving them to a separate section is a good step.

More generally, I'm not sure if we need a "What's new" section in the long run. Taking the matplotlib version as a category criterion seems not quite useful. Nobody cares if a feature was added in 0.98 or 1.2.1 when looking at the gallery. For future additions, I propose not to add "What's new" plots. Instead, add regular plots in the respective categories and link to them in the "What's new" document; or add an inline plot there if that's more suitable.

With the existing ones, we should finally also integrate them in the regular sections. Depending how important it is to keep the "What's new" aspect, we could edit the examples and old "What's new" files" accordingly. - Or we just discard that aspect because nobody cares about that in current docs (it would still be present in old versions of the docs).

So the reason I like a standalone what's new section, especially if we can pull in more images from the newer what's news, is that it shows a record of new features to the library/that the library is dynamic & responsive to user requests. I agree that maybe making a standalone what's new section in an already too crowded gallery long term isn't the right approach, but I think that may be a bigger discussion on what is the point of the gallery/should we maybe have multiple smaller gallery pages that serve different purposes?

it shows a record of new features to the library/that the library is dynamic & responsive to user requests.

Isn't that what https://matplotlib.org/devdocs/users/whats_new.html is for? I agree that this is not as nicely formatted/described as it could be; and the pages for older what's new entries are hard to find.

Kind of, but the what's new pages are not a gallery (the visual is really important to me cause it's a visualization library) nor is it super discoverable right now (it's like 3 links under docs I think), but maybe the fix is something like using sphinx gallery in more places & putting a link + small blurb on the what's new in the right sidebar on the home page like a lot of other libraries do?

Kind of. I think there are multiple things to do here.

My main point is that a user is only interested in "What's new" of the last 1-2 releases. Everything else is established functionality in the library, and "new in version 0.x" is not a criterion I would look for in the gallery, instead the content (e.g. "Fill between") is the most relevant property and should be the main organization criterion.

Maybe a “new” badge on examples added in the last two releases?

I really like that @jklymak if it's doable!

What's New discoverablity/layout can totally be addressed in a seperate issue

A "new" badge (or more general badges) would likely need to be a feature of sphinx-gallery because it generates the HTML code.

Hi,
Since it doesn't seem like badges are a feature for sphinx-gallery would using an emoji like 🌟 at the beginning of the title of the recent examples achieve the same result?

@smolgeat I think it's that that probably can't be automated and we'd have to have a legend to explain what that symbol means, but you're welcome to give it shot.

closing since the what's new section is gone in favor of #23506 - if those directives get added, can maybe use them for gallery badges

Was there a reason for re-opening?

Oh, probably cause I was talking to @melissawm about using sphinx-tags for this - I think basically auto generating tags from version added directives. simplest is probably to add which version the feature the example went in as a tag in the example and alias the release version tag to a 'new feature' tag.

I also don't think we've actually solved this in any good way but I'll close this in favor of making a new issue that proposes something concrete.