Do you want full control of your project management system? We just deployed a new version of Tixit that allows you to share plugins you upload with the world!
Tixit plugins allow anybody to create functionality and share it with the community. A plugin is a frontend component that runs directly in a user’s browser. This can be something as simple as a small button or checkbox, or it can be as large as a complete interface connecting to and interacting with another application. In fact, the check-boxes, text input areas, and list of sub-tickets are all plugins! These plugins can be added to any Tixit layout, giving you the ability to add different features to different projects.
So why did we create a platform where users could upload plugins? A plugin system is powerful for two major reasons. First, you can build your own custom features if they aren’t yet available. Second, the more people who share plugins in Tixit’s plugin library, the more features that will be available to you without having to build them yourself. If you choose, you can also make money by charging people to use a plugin that you built.
We encourage you to build plugins that are simple and modular so they can be pieced together inside layouts in novel ways. A huge embedded application like this feedback salesforce app can be useful, but isn’t very easy to modify. A set of small components can be mixed together in new interesting ways far easier. In Tixit, you can build interfaces from plugin components in Tixit’s layout editor. Next month, we’ll be releasing the package library, which will allow users to share layouts they create with the community.
Last post, we showed an example of a very simple art asset tracker using a couple of small plugins. Here is the color dropdown we created for that project:
It’s a fairly simple component you can configure, in the layout editor, with your own statuses and associated colors.
We just released this plugin open-source on github. Find it on Tixit by searching for “colorDropdown” in the package library.
If you’d like to try your hand at building your own plugin, check out this hello world tutorial. We would love to hear about any plugins you create and any advice you have for us!
Billy Tetrud and The Tixit Team
