Ok, so if the SDK API has been frozen for WIP, it is now the last minutes in which you can still auto-tag all existing Plugin’s on Foot4Rhino with a Rhino Version tag “5.xx”
Apart from that, considering the wast number of plugins, with very mixed quality and usefulness, I really think that the site should have the option to be listed based on dedicated fields for
- Date - First Upload
- Date - Of Last Update
- Plugin Version - Plugin Version Number,
- Maintenance Level - Number of versions uploaded / Years from first upload. (Indicator of maintenance activity level). Or other measure?
- Category - Tags (Surface, Curves, Mesh, Nurbs, Connectivity, Mechanical, Shipbuilding, FEA, Grasshopper, Rhino etc). A mandatory “Main Category” revised by McNeel + User defined subcategories.
- Rhino Version - Rhino/GrassHopper Compatibility.
- Downloads - Number of
- Rating (Votes + Rating)
- Website (if any)
- Contact (developers)
- Simlilar plugins (in terms of funtionality)
- Related plugins (prerequisite, or supports/adds to this one)
- (From the same developer - Already exists)
- Other software - Whether the same plugin is available also for other software (indicates “software viability” due to potentially more sale).
- Trial
- Trial Period - (if any)
- Price - Per one seat (if any)
OK, some of the above is now included in the Browse listing, but many more of the above is needed in the form of tabular listings. Perhaps the fields to be listed could be optionally checkmarked as a filter.
Also make a standard form for upload when presenting the plugins (well, perhaps there is one already) with very strict requirement for a leading short and meaningful desciptive one-liner (rather than greetings and prosaic/poems) about the functionality of the plugin.
The Browser listing has become better over time. But again, somehow demand of the uploader to start their description with describing what their plugin really does (one-liner + more extensive descriptions). It takes for ever to find and compare plugins.
More fields? Please suggest more useful fields for efficiently finding plugins.
The increasing number of plugins makes this kind of tagging increasingly more neccesary in order to be useful. Simplifying the serach would significantly increase value both to the Plugin-writers and to the end users. (only after going thropugh the entire list three times over the last three months I found two of the plugins that makes life easy to me).
If not already using something similar, using web-software like https://processwire.com/ or the alike would make the web-development very fast and dead simple (processwire is a very lightweight and performant CMS platform, without all the extra crap).
// Rolf