JetBrains Platform
Plugin and extension development for JetBrains products.
The JetBrains Platform Gets a New Community Space
JetBrains products, including JetBrains IDEs, YouTrack, TeamCity, and others, are designed with extensibility in mind. While we try to provide our users with a wide feature set, it is impossible to cover all technologies and use cases in a dynamic market like software development. Many ecosystems get new frameworks and libraries every day, and developers are constantly trying to improve their work by adopting new approaches requiring tooling adjustments. This is where our incredible community of plugin and extension developers takes the initiative and develops great products, helping to meet the needs of even more users.
The current state of the community
Over the years, our community has gathered mostly in two places: a support forum and a chat space.
The current forum is the official support space monitored by the JetBrains team. It is mostly a Q&A platform, where our team answers plugin development questions. However, the forum wasn’t enough for some parts of our community. This is why they initiated the creation of a chat space. The idea was to have a place where plugin developers could hang out, chat, and enjoy the feeling of being part of a community. The chat space started as a Gitter space and later migrated to Slack.
Last year, forum members asked 677 questions, which were viewed over 95,000 times. The Slack workspace has a substantial number of users, with many new members joining in the past year. This indicates that the community of plugin developers is vibrant and growing dynamically.
Challenges with the existing support channels
Unfortunately, the current support platforms are insufficient to build a united community. The community is split between two spaces, and members often can’t connect with each other or cross-post questions initiating two separate discussions. It would be much better to gather everyone in the same place, allowing more people to connect and discuss plugin development issues, share experiences, and chat.
The current solutions also have technical and usability limitations.
The forum engine is inefficient for discussing software development topics. It lacks advanced code formatting capabilities, doesn’t support Markdown, which is widely used by software developers, and has an inconvenient search engine, to name a few of the issues.
While Slack is great for chats, search engines don’t index its messages. This makes it hard for people outside the workspace to benefit from the shared knowledge. In addition, accessing the chat history became problematic, making it difficult for users to learn from answers, even if they were already signed into our Slack workspace.
We want to improve this situation and provide our community members a better space to connect.
Introducing the new JetBrains Platform community space
We are happy to introduce the new JetBrains Platform community space, available at https://platform.jetbrains.com.
The new space is powered by the popular Discourse community platform. Discourse is a modern and efficient open-source solution used by many software development communities. It brings the best of both worlds:
- A forum for sharing valuable knowledge and experience, indexed by search engines and easily accessible by all interested developers
- Chats for quick, real-time conversations
Discourse is a perfect match for software development discussions. It supports Markdown, BBCode, and HTML for writing posts, has a powerful code snippet highlighting engine that covers over 190 languages, and includes a convenient search feature. Like our products, it’s designed with extensibility in mind, allowing us to tailor it to the community’s needs.
We believe that the new space will help our community evolve into a more connected group of people who want to learn and share their knowledge and experiences with others.
What you’ll find in the forum
The forum is structured into categories and subcategories. The current structure includes:
- Announcements – Updates on the JetBrains Platform and its ecosystem.
- IntelliJ Platform – Everything related to developing plugins for JetBrains IDEs. It contains subcategories such as Gradle Build Scripts, Plugin Verifier, and Testing.
- ReSharper Platform – Discussions about extending Rider and ReSharper.
- TeamCity – Discussions about extending TeamCity.
- JetBrains Marketplace – Everything related to publishing your plugin on JetBrains Marketplace. It contains subcategories such as Marketing and Monetization.
- Showcase & Feedback – A place for sharing your plugins and gathering feedback from the community.
- Collaboration & Ideas – Posts with plugin ideas and announcements about collaboration opportunities.
- Site Feedback – Discussions about the forum itself, its structure, and potential improvements.
- Off-Topic – Anything else you’d like to discuss with the community members.
These categories are displayed on the main page. Please use them for your questions and discussions. Above the categories, you’ll find quick links for the Latest, New, and Hot topics currently being discussed.
In addition to the forum, you can use chat for more ephemeral communication. It can be accessed from the site navigation header. Please note that chat messages will not persist forever and should not be used for questions that forum categories can cover. Use chat for informal, casual conversations.
While chats allow for private communication, you may need to discuss something directly and have it persist. For this, use private messages, which function more like topics or emails. They have titles and are saved for future reference. You can start a private conversation by going to a user’s profile and clicking the Message button.
How to get started
The JetBrains Platform space allows you to sign up through JetBrains Hub. You can use your existing JetBrains Hub account or easily create one by using one of the most popular SSO providers.
Once you’ve signed in, check the Welcome to JetBrains Platform! post for instructions on how to get started. We encourage you to introduce yourself by filling out your profile information, and it would be great to hear from you in the chat! Once you’ve introduced yourself and become familiar with the interface, feel free to browse existing topics or create a new one in the proper category. If anything is unclear, don’t hesitate to ask for help in the chat.
What will happen to the current spaces?
The Zendesk forum for plugin developers will be preserved in read-only mode, ensuring that the knowledge accumulated over the years remains accessible. Similarly, the JetBrains Platform Slack workspace will soon transition to read-only. We encourage all community members to join us in moving to the new and improved space. We are always open to further improvement, so please provide us with your feedback.
Let’s build a more united community together! See you at https://platform.jetbrains.com.
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