Addon Development

Great products better

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Building addons is often a great way to make productized integrations - or just build on top of greatness and make great products better.

Building addons if often a vital component of building integrations - as an integration often is deployed as an addon for each system it integrates. And at CodeArt we love the challenge of extending existing systems in an elegant way. Both Episerver, Contentful and pretty much any other extendable system we come in contact with.

Allan, CEO of CodeArt says:

One of the things I love about Episerver is it's extensibility and how easy it is to build addons for it. And over the years I've built numerous add-ons for Episerver. Some of them are available today as open source, some have been productized - and others have met a silent death.
Some of the Episerver Addons I've been involved in the creation of are:

  • MobilePack - A quite widely used plugin for CMS 6 to provide Mobile capabilities. Many of the features were later rewritten and productized into the core of Episerver
  • CriteriaPack - Initiated on Codeplex by me, later development done by Episerver Dev.
  • Virtual Roles - Add-on for CMS 5/6. Was part inspiration for the CMS 6R2 feature Visitor Groups which exist and is used today for personalization in Episerver
  • Self-Optimizing Block - A CMS 7 feature for content optimization. Was later productized and is today maintained by Episerver Dev.
  • ServiceAPIExtensions - An extension to the Episerver ServiceAPI to allow for full content CRUD operations. The latest versions of the Service API solves some of the same problems as this one - although it is still read-only.
  • Forms - The current way to work with web site forms in Episerver. It's build and maintained by Episerver Dev, but I worked on the initial prototype and product managed it for it's first year.
  • Episerver Cognitive Services - An add-on that let's you use Azure Cognitive Services to enhance Media meta data in Episerver.

I've also made experimental add-ins for Office, Extensions for Google Chrome and Connectors for Microsoft Flow and Zapier. Not all of them have been released, but has instead solved their purpose as demos or prototypes to evaluate an idea. Others might be released later...