We are happy to announce 2.1.0rc1!

Wheels and and source on pypi and as a conda package via conda-forge.  Please try it out and report any issues!

See http://matplotlib.org/devdocs/users/whats_new.html for a draft of the release notes.   This represents ~2 years of work and includes many new features and bug fixes.

Please checkout our updated documentation (http://matplotlib.org/devdocs/index.html), particularly the  examples (http://matplotlib.org/devdocs/gallery/index.html ) and tutorials (http://matplotlib.org/devdocs/tutorials/index.html) .  Re-organizing, updating, and migrating the examples to sphinx-gallery was a huge effort led by Nelle Varoquaux and  Chris Holdgraf. 

A big thanks to the many (~280) people who contributed to this release.

Installation instructions (via pip into existing venv):

  pip install --upgrade --pre matplotlib

or (via conda into a new venv)

  conda create -n mpl_rc matplotlib ipython -c conda-forge/label/rc -c conda-forge

 conda install -c conda-forge/label/rc matplotlib -c conda-forge

Tom