Userinfo Plugin Tutorial

Introduction

This tutorial is being written during the course of the development of a Confluence plugin. It is a demonstration of a number of techniques and tips useful to plugin development, and also of how all the various types of Confluence plugin modules can be combined to add new features to the Confluence application.

The plugin being developed during the course of this tutorial is not just a toy or a random idea that was thought up to write a guide around, it's actually something that we intend to make use of on the Atlassian extranet, fulfilling a real requirement of our business.

I'm hoping to add new chapters to the tutorial each week until it development of the plugin is complete.

Requirements

In order to get the most out of this tutorial, you should have:

1. Confluence 2.2 (the plugin makes use of features that were not available in Confluence 2.1 or earlier)
2. A suitable plugin development environment.

The Plugin

On the Atlassian extranet, which is obviously powered by Confluence, we keep a staff directory. This directory is really just a single Confluence page with a section for each staff member. Here's mine:

When we started the page, there were only about twenty people in the company. Now we've grown over fifty, it has started to become unwieldy, and with each new hire it gets a little harder to maintain. Thus, the aims of the userinfo plugin are:

• Allow users to maintain their own contact details
• Provide a way to display contact information in wiki pages

Once that's done, we could add more features like:

• A searchable / categorisable staff directory
• vCard export of contact information
• iCal export of staff birthdays

(How many of these we get done really depends on how much time I have to spare )

Contents

• UPT4 - Display the info in a macro
• UPT 1 - Getting Started
• UPT 2 - Getting the Data
• UPT 3 - Integrating with the Confluence UI

Coming Soon:

• UPT 3 - Integrating with the Confluence UI
• [UPT 4 - The userinfo Macro]
• More...