Welcome!

a_block

Dear development community,

it's a good 3.5 years since MAXON's new SDK Team took the task to improve support for external developers. The aging forum infrastructure of Plugin Café has been on our todo list almost from day one. After quite some research and comparison of options, we came to the conclusion, a complete reboot would probably be the best solution. The release of Cinema 4D R20 with major changes to the SDKs and APIs would make up a good point in time. With this new platform we now can appropriately separate between the classic API and MAXON API, very important during the transition phase.

So, here you go, our all new cozy place for plugin development related questions and discussions: The new Plugin Café based on nodeBB.
We really hope you will like it and we'll have lots of fruitful discussions.

Let me quickly take you be the hand and show around.

Topmost you find a bunch of icons:

From left to right these lead you to:

Categories
Your unread posts
Recent Topics
Tags to quickly search and browse the forum content
Most Popular Topics
Forum Users
Plugin ID request page for classic and hybrid plugins

In the top right corner you find:

Again from left to right:

Forum search, expand and click button on the right to reach advanced search
Your notifications
The currently disabled chat option. We will see, if we make use of it one day.
Your user menu with access to your profile, forum settings and also logout.

The forum is structured into categories, which should be pretty much self-explanatory. In order to provide even more structure and ways to easily find what one is looking for, we decided against more detailed categories, but instead to make use of a tagging system. See How to Post Questions for more details. We imported the content of the old Plugin Café forums into a separate Legacy Forum category. So all the information you got used to is still available and can be searched with the powerful new search. We made the content there read-only, though. If you want to pick up a discussion, please create a new topic and link to the old thread.

When reading/browsing the forum, you now also have the option to up- or down-vote posts. We encourage everybody to make use of this feature to mark the most helpful and interesting posts and answers.

Writing posts is an all new experience compared to the old forum. You have mark down available and directly get to see a live preview of your post. Finally you can also upload screenshots directly to the forum, no more need to upload and link to external resources.

The search is much cleaner, now. Just take a look at the Advanced Search. We think, you'll especially like the ability to save your personal search preferences.

Last but not least, we hope you will agree, the new platform feels a bit more modern and certainly faster. And even though it is a forum for developers, who by nature are not that easily caught by eye candy, we still thought, a bit cleaner and nicer look wouldn't hurt.

To learn more about the new Plugin Café forums and its rules, please take a look at the Forum Information & Resources category.

This of course was just the first step. Please provide us with your feedback. Simply post it into the Forum Information & Resources category. Over time we will certainly adapt this place even more to your needs and extend it as we see fit.

Cheers,
Andreas and the entire SDK Team

iluxa7k

@a_block and sdk team
Cool forum...!!!

bonsak

Congrats on the new forum!
About time

a_block

Thanks, we are glad you like it.

Klaus

was it really required to make a new registration? The old account doesn't work on the new forum?

a_block

Hello Klaus,

yes, it was a deliberate decision to make everybody register from anew. In the old forum had thousands of spam accounts, we wanted to get rid of.

We hope, you can understand and that it's not too big of an inconvenience.

Cheers,
Andreas