Release Notes
Sketchpacks API — Enhancements
Measuring user engagement
Happy new year to the Sketch community! Over the past year, Sketchpacks has seen an incredible leap in activity! So to all the people and organizations using Sketchpacks; Thanks for your support!
Our primary focus over the past several months has been on improving API stability, performance, and bug squashing. We have also been working on improved analytics for plugin developers, and a better discovery experience for plugin consumers.
This article is focused on our recent API and web client enhancements for plugin developers. The desktop client will be getting more attention in the near future.
We have big plans for Sketchpacks in 2018, so stay tuned for an upcoming blog post about our 1.0 release roadmap!
API Documentation
Apiary Docs: https://sketchpacks.docs.apiary.io/#
Swagger Docs: https://api.sketchpacks.com/api-docs/v1/swagger.json
Sketchpacks Docs: https://docs.sketchpacks.com/
New API Features
Appcast Request Metrics
How many people are using your plugin? Is that number increasing?
Our new appcast metrics can help you answer these questions. We have updated the API to count unique requests for your appcast feed. This data is aggregated daily and is now available on your plugins “Insights” tab.
All unique appcast requests will be counted, regardless of the plugin management tool being used. Which means native Sketch updates are included in the count!
Note: You must use the Sketchpacks appcast feed for the Daily Usage metrics to be available. For setup information and troubleshooting, see our documentation.
Relay Activity Feed
The main goal of Sketchpacks Relay is to provide an unobtrusive update mechanism for your plugins. However, when things go wrong and Relay rejects changes, it’s unobtrusiveness becomes a problem.
To help bring more transparency, we have added a new activity feed for Relay events. If an event is rejected, it will also contain error messages so you can better troubleshoot the problem.
Note: We are still working on better notifications when a Relay installation fails. If you run into this problem, check out our FAQ and documentation for help.
SKPM Compatibility
We have been hard at work making sure new plugins created with SKPM can integrate with Sketchpacks Relay.
- Relay now syncs with a repositories package.json
- Relay now checks the ‘skpm’ field in a package.json if data can not be found in the manifest.json
Important: Sketchpacks requires a unique identifier for each plugin. Make sure one is available in either your manifest.json or package.json
We highly recommend upgrading your existing plugins to use SKPM! It will make the whole plugin ecosystem better if we can all use a common build tool. It’s also a great tool for your plugins continuous integration and delivery workflow! Did you know SKPM can now test your plugins also?
For more information about SKPM compatibility with Sketchpacks, see our FAQ or documentation page.
Recent API Enhancements
Popularity Scores
We changed the popularity scores to rely less on Github metadata, and more on our own metrics. Combined with a better Insights UI, plugin popularity will be more dynamic and add greater visibility for rising popular plugins.
For more information on how plugin popularity is calculated, see our documentation.
Search Improvements
Less is more they say. Well in this case it turned out to be true! We were receiving feedback that the plugin searching was not specific enough when directly searching for a plugin.
It turns our that plugin readmes were adding extra noise to full text searching. After removing readmes from the search vectors, searches instantly became much more relevant. We also topped this off with a healthy dose of caching for common queries.
For more information on how the plugin search indexes are built, see our documentation page.
We love hearing feedback
✉️ Give feedback
Have some feedback you’d like to share? Good, we’re all ears. Leave us feedback in our github.
🐛 Report a bug
Be awesome today and report any bugs you notice. Report bugs at our Github Issues.
❓Ask a question
Have a general question you’d like answered? Feel free to email us.
