This appears to be a bug caused by the Mac System Integrity Protection and not the fault of Crowd Render, as other plug-ins may not work either. If you can install CR, but cannot enable it without an error, this may be the cause.
Go into the recovery manager while your Mac boots up “Command-R”. Then go into the terminal and type “csrutil disable” and then hit return. Reboot and see if Blender add-ons are working.
If this is indeed the problem, it would be a Blender bug they need to fix. It appears to be some type of permissions related error.
Dear Paul,
Thanks so much for letting us know! We're checking this out now :D Awesome work on discovering a workaround too!
Hi Paul, ok, an update, I can run addons perfectly fine in 2.80.74, build hash bbb3500c9716. This was a version of 2.80.74 that was just prior to the release candidate, so something might have gone wrong when they bundled the release candidate. I've put a thread on devtalk.blender.org to ask what is going on. You can find that thread here -> https://devtalk.blender.org/t/release-candidate-blender-2-80-cant-import-addons/8352?u=jamescrowther
If you like, you can take a look and perhaps comment there to help anyone else who's trying to use addons?
Hi Paul, I've verified that disabling the system integrity system does work and the addons are now working again. Though I have to admit, I don't know how many mac users will be happy at the thought of disabling this! Still it works for me and is very easy to do. Though I think we should recommend doing it only temporarily until Blender fixes the problem that they have introduced.
Oh I agree... not a long term solution. This is a Blender 2.8 bug and they need to fix it before the final release.
Hi Paul, try downloading the latest release candidate, I believe Brecht from the Blender development team has pushed a fix for this now.
For more info see -> https://developer.blender.org/T66986
I did earlier today... and unfortunately it did not work. I will try again tomorrow.
Ok, dang, can you tell us what the build hash is for the blender RC you just tested? That way I'll have something to compare to when I try later today :)
Where does one find that information? It's not under the Splash Screen..
@Paul Reznick Its part of the blender python API. So you need to open a scripting tab. You can find the scripting tab under the general section in the tabs.
Once you have that open you'll see the python console, it has blue text on a black background if you're using the default theme of 2.80.
Type the following command into python console;
bpy.app.build_hash
this will print out the build hash number :)