Plans for Extensions and Marketplace

Speaker 0: Good day, everyone. I'm Benny, and I have the privilege of talking about our plans for the extensions and marketplace ecosystem. I recently joined the team with the goal of focusing on the developer and user experiences of Directus Extensions. This includes the overall extension development and deployment lifecycle, our public facing marketplace, and the underlying registry API. Many of you have been wondering what will come next for the marketplace since our release of the beta at our last Leap Week.

Let me start by thanking each of you who have contributed to testing and providing feedback on the marketplace in any way. Let's discuss the developer experience first. One of the key parts of improving the developer experience, and also partly the discoverability of extensions is in bringing new capabilities to the Extension Sandbox SDK. With the upcoming release of our new policy system, we are expecting to be able to provide granular access to things like the underlying file systems, users, notifications, and emails. One of the biggest opportunities for improving the sandbox that we have identified is, of course, enabling support for importing external libraries.

Even though this may be a significant technical challenge to implement whilst retaining the important security benefits of having a sandbox, we are looking forward to solving this for you. Okay. So what about new extension features? We are exploring how to augment existing extensions, how to deploy data and config templates using the same APIs as extensions, how to add functionality to allow developers to define extension specific settings, and we are looking at increasing the amount of life cycle events available to extension developers. We are frequently asked how to add new plugins to the built in block editor, for example, as well as adding tweaks to other extensions and experiences.

Right now, this is cumbersome, and we think that extensions will benefit from being able to install lightweight enhancements. This means extension developers will be able to package the core functionality for their custom developed user experiences whilst being able to allow others to build on their work. Being able to deploy templates and config via extension system will allow users to include things like data structures and email templates in a controlled way. Extension settings being configurable in the app will allow the inclusion of API keys and other configuration that isn't dependent on having access to environment variables at deploy time. Our life cycle hooks will allow for better management of installing and uninstalling extensions.

These are just some of the features we are planning to add to the road map soon to help craft our growing extension library. The last set of work we will be focusing on before moving the marketplace out of beta will ensure your extensions are seen by the widest audience possible. Our marketplace listings will be more dynamic and easier to find what you are looking for. This will include providing more options for meta information to control elements such as how details about individual contributors are displayed, as well as adding elements like hero screenshots and logos. This may also include enhancements to the configurable meta information, like better tagging options to improve searching for extensions.

To help increase visibility, we are looking at how to make extensions listed in the marketplace discoverable outside of the director's studio so that anyone can link to them for consideration outside of an existing project. We also want to provide extension authors with insights into how their extensions are performing. This may include being able to do things like react to comments, reviews, and feedback from users as a verified extension author. Finally, we are looking at how to indicate the quality of each of the extensions public in the marketplace in a clear and transparent way. This will help users get the best experience and provide developers clear guidelines on how to produce high quality extensions.

These new changes will be implemented in both the Data Studio as well as the registry API. Once these changes are implemented, we will publish the registry API spec to enable developers to publish and maintain their own additional registries. As you have heard, there is a lot going into the marketplace. We are looking forward to sharing the road map with you in the next couple of weeks, and you'll be able to see the priority of the item stem. We wanted to take this opportunity to provide some insight into how the road map is being developed and what will be coming.

Once this work is done, the marketplace will be ready for general availability. We hope you are as excited as we are for some of these upcoming changes. We are really passionate about the directors extension ecosystem, and I can't wait to see what you create.