I am a plugin developer for SketchUp and since the publication of “Extension Warehouse 2”, I no longer have any visitors arriving on my site from “Extension Warehouse 2”!
With the old version I had between 20 and 30 visits per day which came from the referencing of the warehouse.
To understand I put myself in the place of the user and clicking on the link that leads to my site and I got this scary message:
Even if 99% of users will click on “Cancel”, I still had the courage to click “Leave”!
To my surprise I did not leave the warehouse 'extensions site because a new page is open to display my site.
For the interest of all developers who have contributed to the success of SketchUp, please delete this message which will kill many developers like me.
I am glad to see that you agree.
I hope this warning window will be removed quickly.
As I know that you wish for the success of your developers, it would be truly extraordinary to add a link to the developer’s site on each thumbnail of their plugins:
This would be a revolutionary option that will allow many developers to increase traffic to their websites.
Unfortunately today it is very difficult to be visible without the warehouse extension!
As the developers have done a lot for SketchUp it would be a very good way to thank them.
A custom website link in the list page would be quite noisy. What it can have is the name of the author, linking to their store, which in turn has a link to an external site.
What you offer is also interesting because it can improve traffic to the developers’ site!
Under no circumstances should users be isolated in the warehouse extension by preventing them from leaving.
Over time this is very bad for developers and will be very bad for SketchUp.
It is really urgent to solve this problem in the next update to come.
Thanks Chris
The main thing is that this window will be removed in the future.
Now that the main problem is taken care of, I can give my ideas for improving the warehouse 2 extensions.
I have noticed that the images are classified in front of the videos whereas the opposite would be more logical. Because of this, the user may miss the plugins presentation video.
After clicking on a category, the extensions are classified by relevance by default! It doesn’t make sense like the alphabetical ordering of “warehouse 1 extensions”. The best solution would be to rank the most successful extensions first.
Developers should be allowed to offer more than one video for each extension.
The developer must be able to add links in their text to orient users.
Which is positive to change a little:
The classification is cleaner then all the extensions gaining visibility.
I don’t see how one way is more logical that the other. If you swap the order, then users would risk missing the images, just as much as they now risk missing the video. I’d rather let the developer set the order of both images and videos as in the old Warehouse.
I often have one image that shows everything at once, a few that shows details and a video that only show one thing at a time and doesn’t give an overview until you’ve watched it all. I prefer having the image giving an overview first for my extensions.
Agree. This was also how the old Warehouse worked.
Markdown support has been promised by Peter Saal, but there are some bug fixes that have higher priority than this feature,
Right now we’re in bug-fixes mode, which is to be expected after such a big rewrite. Once the dust has settled we’ll be addressing some more the more important feature feedback (such as this one.)
As a developer you should be able to reorder images/videos (I believe this is broken and will be added later. If you want to change it now, you can remove all and reupload them in correct order).
That could cause a filter bubble so that only extensions will rise in popularity that are shown on first results page. That could be unfair for new extensions or well-done extensions compared to those that have just good promotion and advertizement on social networks.
In most cases, videos are more important than pictures.
I agree but it requires a lot more development work when it is easy to reverse.
This is very good news.
This is not the case with the Warehouse extensions 2 because the images are separated from the Youtube link.
I do not think that external promotion changes much the success of an extension in the Warehouse 2 extensions. The most important thing is to meet the needs of users and offer a good product with a good presentation. The presentation thumbnail and the description are also important.
