Hey there,
I just recently published my first plugin on the exchange and while it has been a mostly straight-forward process I believe that things could be a little nicer.
I have a strong development background and have a lot less checkmk administration under my belt so my views might be a little bit different. You have been warned 
Uploading
Uploading in general is a very easy process. Good!
I think it would be nice to have an easy possibility to upload new package versions to some kind of HTTP endpoint tool so that I could integrate it into my CI pipeline.
Images vs. Categories
I thought the images are a nice touch but I tried to somehow emulate some kind of category with my icon choice.
Having proper categories would be nice IMHO.
I think that categories could help you find interesting plugins where you don’t exactly know what is there or you don’t know the exact wording to look for.
Description
The required introduction of your package is a strange choice IMHO since there is already a description in my package.
Right now it is decoupled from the description of my package and I have to manually update this.
I’d like to see this being taken from the MKP. For this purpose maybe add something like a short description.
I think it is strange that the introduction of a package isn’t visible on the package detail view.
On the bright side the introduction allows using emojies 
(pssst, don’t tell everyone so that my plugin stays unique 
)
Exchange vs. WATO
As mentioned before my package has a description already in the MKP. But it is hard to see in WATO. Why isn’t a short description of a package present in the plugin overview?
I think this would be nice for larger instances with many packages.
Formatting for long descriptions
I maintain a README that covers additional information for the plugin usage. This README is formatted in Markdown so that GitLab (or GitHub for that matter) can produce a nice looking text for my users.
I’d like to have some sort of markdown ability in order to create a useful help file that people like to read.
EDIT: Appearantly you can submit HTML as part of your package description. Works for me but might allow for some unwanted things if not checked properly.
It could be also some other kind of markup language. I like markdown because I thnk it is easy to grasp for the majority of people and can still be manually written / read without special tools.
Images
Sometimes a picture speaks more than a thousand words.
I think that dashboard extensions would massively benefit from being able to show how they look.
Links
Right now there is only one link available for my package. I’d like to have at least two so that I can…
- Link to the source code repository
- Link to a place with additional information
Package versions
The package details are fine but I think the UX could be nicer here.
The info about a package requiring a newer version is somehow detached from the version info of the MKP. I’d say move the warning up there.
Or - and I like this a lot more - remove the warning for current versions of checkmk. You have to do additional steps to download an older version and I think the amount of newly setup instances with oldstable gets fewer by the day.
Also what will happen when 2.1 arrives and plugins use some new features - will you add a another warning?
I think it would be nice to be able to limit my search to packages that match specific version criteria (i.e. running on 2.0 but not running on 2.1 so that I can match my setup).
The package version details list a lot of info that I think as mostly irrelevant for most use cases: packaged at, version used to create. I think these could be hidden away and only be presented when a user requests it.
What I am missing is the information about the package upload which has somehow been moved to the left. I think this info should be moved over to the version information because it shows me how old something is.
Package Maintenance
There might be a time where more people than myself are working on a plugin. It would be nice to have some kind of shared maintenance role for a package where I can share this task with another person.
My impression is that right now I’d have to share my access to the exchange which I’d rather not do.
User Profile
I think it would be very nice to have some kind of coupling with the forum account as this is probably what most people use already and usually contains way more information than what is available now.
I see two additional benefits in this:
- allow for an easy way to get in contact with a maintainer
- see what packages come from a partner (they have badge / profile title on the forums)
Last words
So this has been that. I will emphasize that I think in general it is not a bad site, it just has room for some improvement. What do you think?
Cheers!
