We’ve brought a brand new feature to JetBrains Marketplace – Plugin Ideas! It’s a place for sharing ideas for plugins and functionality missing from IntelliJ-based IDEs. If you like any of the ideas you can cast your vote on them to help them get the attention of plugin developers and even add your own feedback on what you would like to see. Let’s take a look into the details of how it works!
Backstory
In 2010, the Plugins Repository introduced a Wishlist section where users could express what features they felt were missing in their IntelliJ-based IDE. We’ve collected hundreds of suggestions over the years, resulting in hundreds of enhancements to our products. Many third-party plugins were also created, including gems like Perl, Ember.js, IDEA Jetty Runner, Fortran, and PlantUML integration.
Over two years ago, as a replacement for the Plugins Repository, we introduced JetBrains Marketplace and added the Paid Plugins feature a year later. In the meantime, essential items on the Wishlist were migrated over to our YouTrack issue tracker, where more and more ideas are being added. Recently, we’ve decided to use YouTrack as a single source of truth, primarily because of better the integration it has with our workflow, but also to increase the visibility of the wishlist in a more user-friendly way. This then evolved into Plugin Ideas.
Plugin Ideas
As the first step in introducing YouTrack issues as a data source for Plugin Ideas, we marked all the tickets with suitable plugins worth implementing with the plugin-welcome tag. As a result, we’ve collected over sixty tickets that are good starting points for becoming plugins and may even be worth introducing as paid plugins in the Marketplace.
We tried to keep the interface of Plugin Ideas as simple as possible and give you a general overview of the most exciting ideas by highlighting them with the following categories:
- Most Requested
- Trending This Month
- Newcomers
Each of the tiles will lead you to the relevant YouTrack ticket, in which you can read the details, join the discussion, cast your vote, or watch the thread to get notified about new replies.
To create a new entry, use the Create Idea button and fill out the form. It will take you to YouTrack, where all the required fields to make your ticket appear on the Plugin Ideas website will be preselected. Note that interacting with YouTrack requires having an active account, but you can create a free account during this process if you don’t have one already.
Plugin Development
If you already have a clear idea for a new plugin to create, consider using the IntelliJ Platform Plugin Template to speed up the whole process. It provides a preconfigured project scaffold together with continuous integration and deployment workflows based on GitHub Action. We’d also like to make you aware of our curated solution, which should help make you aware of some of the tooling we’re working on (like Gradle IntelliJ Plugin, Gradle Changelog Plugin, and Grammar-Kit) for new and existing developers.
Other good places to start are:
If you get stuck at any point, please feel free to reach out to us using the IntelliJ IDEA Open API and Plugin Development Forum or JetBrains Platform Slack.
Stay tuned and follow us on Twitter!
Jakub Chrzanowski and JetBrains Platform
