Jeff and Edson,
You are right on! I unzipped the files in another location and just brought over the guts to the plugins file. Everything is working great now! This is very encouraging as I have struggled with this for a couple of weeks on my own and haven't found much help on google. Thanks for your time to help out the newbies.

Jeff,
Thanks for helping me find the correct folder. I put a few plugins in there like (ellipse.rb) but none of them have worked yet. I just wanted to verify that there is nothing obvious I am overlooking after I put the plugins in the folder, unzip them, and restart SU8. I think I'll install some earlier versions of SU and see if that makes any difference.

Another question: Are all .rb SU plugin scripts compatible on a mac and pc or do some only work on a pc?

Has anyone had any luck getting plugins to work in SU 8 for a mac? If so can you let me know if there was anything special you had to do? I also haven't been able to find the plugin folder that should be located at /Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 8/SketchUp/Plugins

Thanks