I've created and published a tool for helping to generate new NodeBB plugins. I'd be interested in people's feedback on how well it works and additional functionality. Launching the tool prompts the user about necessary features and then generates a plugin .

The generator can currently help to:

• Correctly create the package.json and plugin.json files with the appropriate default contents
• Create the stub methods and files for a new widget
• Create the stub methods and files for listening to a system hook
• Create the stub methods and files for a custom admin page
• Create the stub methods and files for a custom page
• Register a stub javascript file that will be injected on all NodeBB pages
• Register a stub style template (less/css) that will be injected on all NodeBB pages
• Register a reference to a template folder for overriding system templates

I've tested this out in a variety of ways and it seems to work properly as of NodeBB 0.8.2

You can find the ReadMe with installation instructions here:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/slush-nodebb-plugin

Thanks for any feedback!

I saw that version 0.8.0 was released. This is my second upgrade and I realized I should have a quick way to consistently run backups that would record the version that was backed up and time of the backup. I'm still new to Node.js and NodeBB so I thought I'd do it as a globally installable npm tool.

After installing the tool (npm install -g nodebb-backup) you just run it from your nodebb installation directory:

nodebb-backup

The version number captured is from package.json and the mongo info (yes, mongo only right now) is loaded from config.json. As described in the upgrade docs for NodeBB (https://docs.nodebb.org/vi/latest/upgrading/) it dumps the db and saves the /uploads directory. The db dump and /uploads copy are compressed into a tar named like this:

nodebb-backup-2015-09-01_2236-v0.7.3.tar
(which is saved to the directory above your nodebb install)

If this is useful to you, could you review the code and let me know if you think it is doing the right thing? Also, there are a number of additions that I think would be useful:

• Be able to provide a path to place the resulting back up file
• Redis support
• Maybe be able to restore from a provided tar file?

Anything else? Thanks for looking.

Github: https://github.com/jongarrison/nodebb-backup
Npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/nodebb-backup

Multi-tenancy would be a great feature for NodeBB.

I created a very simple skeleton plugin for reference that works as of NodeBB 0.7.2 https://github.com/jongarrison/nodebb-plugin-skeleton

I created this widget for a client that wanted to be able to manage some widget content on various pages as if it were a post. So I created this widget that allows you to embed a post by its ID number as a widget.

You can use this to create fully custom static(ish) pages in conjunction with the plugin nodebb-plugin-custom-static-pages. And then you can manage that page as if it were a post with the familiar capabilities.

To use this widget install the plugin via npm nodebb-widget-singlepost (https://www.npmjs.com/package/nodebb-widget-singlepost)

WARNING: Feature. I wanted to have the general site content posts hidden in a category that users wouldn't normally see. The widget does not respect normal access privileges and will render any post that you tell it to, including posts that the user doesn't normally have access to. As far as I can tell, the widget params never touch the client and so this shouldn't be a security hole. If you think this is incorrect, please let me know.

@AccessDenied
I went through the same process as you a few months ago and I was able to find much of what I needed between these sources:

1. The docs: https://docs.nodebb.org/en/latest/ (google searches will often send you to out of date versions, watch the urls!)
2. The source: https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB (Having a good IDE helps with making sense of the source and doing good searches)
3. I got a lot of help from purchasing Webstorm IDE (https://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/) I've also heard people here like using Sublime Text with a lot of plugins installed.
4. Finding any existing plugin with related functionality to what I was trying to do was very helpful. For some reason, I found the Mandrill email plugin really helpful at first (https://github.com/akhoury/nodebb-plugin-emailer-mandrill), but just dig around until you find something with functionality related to what you are trying to do.
5. Lastly, I'd search and ask questions here under the plugins category (https://community.nodebb.org/category/7/nodebb-plugins). I've asked a lot of newb questions and the community has been awesome.

A few more notes. When I was first interested in Javascript and Node.js about a year ago, I went through a bunch of tutorials online. I found this one to be very well done: https://github.com/workshopper/learnyounode

Also, after developing a few plugins myself, I wrote this Slush based tool for generating NodeBB plugins based on a number of questions:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/slush-nodebb-plugin

Good luck!

@julian Thanks for the link to nodebb-plugin-quickstart, the really important bit for me was the comment in nodebb-plugin-quickstart/lib/controllers.js:

/*
	Make sure the route matches your path to template exactly.
	If your route was:
		myforum.com/some/complex/route/
	your template should be:
		templates/some/complex/route.tpl
	and you would render it like so:
		res.render('some/complex/route');
*/

I hadn't seen that mentioned anywhere else. So, if I understand custom routes finally, there are really three important routes really:

1. The normal Express route which renders the full page with the header. This handles browser requests straight to the custom route.
2. API route for Ajaxify. The custom plugin code sends some json, which nodebb adds some additional json to.
3. Template route for Ajaxify, which is implied from the url for the api path.

I tried this today and I was able to override an admin template. I'm not sure what I did incorrectly when I tried earlier. Thanks for confirming that this could be done!

@psychobunny said:

ajaxify.data.get

Woah! That's kick ass! There is a lot of data ready to go in that ajaxify.data object. That changes the way I think about loading data into NodeBB templates.

For anyone else interested, in your browser js console just type "ajaxify.data" to see what NodeBB already has loaded for you.

Is this the best spot to learn more about ajaxify? http://4nf.org/

Cool! Just signed it.

Hmm, yeah it would make sense as a full admin plugin with those other features. I'll put those features on the list.

Why you would only want the db without assets? The system isn't complete without both, right?

I don't feel like I understand ajaxify well enough to start writing docs just yet, but I take notes and maybe down the road I can write something up.

You guys seem pretty eager to roll your own stuff. So far it seems like that has worked out very well. I'd be interested in hearing some discussion about the motivations behind doing your own templates.js, translator.js, ajaxify.js, etc...

I've worked on lots of projects in the past that were just huge piles of every existing popular library and that approach certainly can have its own problems. Finding things in your source code so far has been pretty smooth and so I ask the question about motivation just out of curiosity not criticism.

@psychobunny Ah right! Ok, just sent a pull request. Thanks!

Here is another thing that would be good for new plugin devs to find early on...

GitHub - NodeBB/nodebb-plugin-quickstart: A starter kit for quickly creating NodeBB plugins.

A starter kit for quickly creating NodeBB plugins. - NodeBB/nodebb-plugin-quickstart

GitHub (github.com)

Maybe this thread is getting kind of old and shouldn't be pinned any more. When I was starting out trying to develop some plugins it lead me down some odd roads. It is good to see where all of the active community members get their start though

Separately, in 0.9.0, this error message pops up when trying to upload a topic thumbnail:

There is no error in the nodebb logs.

So it appears topic thumbnails do not work in 0.8.2 or 0.9.0

@HolyPhoenix Thanks for catching that typo (I edited my comment, just now). I had correctly tried @psychobunny 's approach without luck but then typed it incorrectly.

I found this post from @baris (https://community.nodebb.org/topic/5942/ajaxify-variables-get-deprecated) that says the .get('name') approach has been deprecated and that this style is current:

ajaxify.data.tickettypes

I am creating some custom pages in a plugin that will be low traffic and I am curious about how to do this through one of two ways:

1. Is there documentation on how to correctly create custom routes that NodeBB's ajaxify.go process will load correctly?
2. Is it possible to get ajaxify.go to ignore certain routes and just treat them like normally loaded pages?

@julian I've had a server under light load on a $5 Digital Ocean for over a year without a crash. The trick seems to be large amounts of swap.

This looks like a great plugin! Is there a reason why it never caught on besides not being kept up to date?