I’m excited today to announce the availability of Atlassian’s newest website, the Atlassian Plugin Exchange. The Plugin Exchange provides an easy way to find, download, and review plugins for all Atlassian products.
The Plugin Exchange was built out of a need to consolidate and scale our burgeoning plugin libraries. Over the last couple of years, interest in developing and using plugins with Atlassian’s products, particularly Confluence and Jira, has skyrocketed. But we’ve started to become a victim of our own success: between our plugin spaces at confluence.atlassian.com, our public subversion, partner sites, etc., its become difficult to reliably find and evaluate new plugins.
Our goals then with the Plugin Exchange have been two-fold: one, make it easier for users to find and install plugins, and two, make it easier for developers to add new plugins. Towards the first goal, we have built a new application from scratch (using Grails) to warehouse all the plugins and make them discoverable by product, by category, by search, by popularity, or any combination of these. Towards the second goal, we have made the process of adding a plugin as simple as filling in a form with information about your plugin, including links to download jar, issue tracker, etc., adding version info, screenshots, etc. and submitting to Atlassian for approval. No more maintaining Confluence pages, editing XML files in your source, etc., we’ve made the process of adding and maintaining a plugin as easy as possible.
But it doesn’t end with the Plugin Exchange. Having a site that makes it easy for you to find and add new plugins is great, but what we really wanted was a way to get at this information from the product itself. To that end, we’ve built a new plugin manager, dubbed the Plugin Exchange Manager, to handle installation and management of plugins in our products. We’ve built this using Atlassian’s Plugins 2.0, meaning that it will work in any product that supports Plugins 2, such as Confluence and Jira. For a sneak preview, check out the video below. The Plugin Exchange Manager isn’t ready for release quite yet, but we’ll get an alpha release out there as soon as we can.
Please head over to the Plugin Exchange and have a look. Better yet, find a new plugin, check it out, and add a review. For more about the Exchange, as well as the plugin manager, please check out the video below.
If you’re a plugin developer and have any questions, please contact developer-relations@atlassian.com.
