Extension Warehouse - nice idea ... in theory?

I am in process of migrating from SU 23 to SU 24. The biggest headache in upgrading is having to re-install plugins/extensions. We are always recommended to re-install them afresh.

It’s easy enough to make a list of the extensions you use. What is less easy is remembering where you got them from. Looking at my current list, almost none of them were from the Extension Warehouse. Most were probably from Sketchucation, but there are Smustard ones, etc.

Some very able and regular producers of extensions choose to deliberately avoid using the EW. Others have their own websites. I guess it is in the nature of open architecture software that this should happen. It’s not Apple, after all! But it would be great if some clever person found a way to streamline the process a bit better. Any clever people out there?

At least for those, if you used the Sketchucation ExtensionStore tool to install them in a previous version of SketchUp, you should be able to install the tool and use it to automatically install the bundle of extensions from Sketchucation.

You may find some of the extensions from Smustard in the Extension Warehouse. The Smustard site is defunct. If you can’t find them elsewhere, go ahead and copy them from the older installation. The worst that can happen is you spend time chasing bad extensions that throw errors during loading.

I suppose you could just copy all of your old ones over and then figure out which ones don’t work and update them. My preference is to just install them fresh and correctly from the beginning and avoid chasing loading errors.

Consider this a time to do some housekeeping. Maybe there are extensions you don’t use anyway. If they aren’t installed they won’t require time to load when you start SketchUp.

Good advice, as always.

And I am overjoyed to find that a really old plugin called Midpoint (that was a Smustard one), written in 2004, still works 20 years later! I probably use that simple plugin more than any other. I would find it hard to work without it now.

My second biggest headache with upgrades is having to repopulate my taskbar with the icons I like to use. Again, I guess there is no shortcut to doing it manually!

No. When I install a new version of SketchUp or install on a different computer I first make a screenshot of the previous version to show the toolbar arrangement. Then I import that image into the new version of SketchUp as a reference for placing my toolbars. It really doesn’t take long to do this stuff and I use the time as I suggested to do some house cleaning.