garden-plugin-author

Authoring a Digital Garden plugin

A garden plugin is a directory that extends a Digital Garden site: markup injected into named layout slots, site-wide styles/scripts, and build-time Eleventy/markdown-it hooks. Plugins are distributed as public GitHub repos with a garden-plugin.json manifest at the repo root, and installed into src/plugins/<id>/ of a garden repo. Follow this skill end to end; do not invent extension points that are not listed here.

Where to work

• Inside a garden or template checkout (a repo with .eleventy.js and src/site/): create your plugin directly at src/plugins/<id>/ and it runs immediately.
• Standalone plugin repo: develop the plugin as its own directory, and for testing clone https://github.com/oleeskild/digitalgarden, run npm install, and symlink or copy your plugin into src/plugins/<id>/.

The plugin id must match ^[a-z0-9][a-z0-9-]*$, must equal the directory name, and must NOT start with dg- (reserved for first-party plugins).

Minimal viable plugin

src/plugins/reading-time/
  garden-plugin.json
  templates/badge.njk

{
  "id": "reading-time",
  "name": "Reading Time",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "Shows an estimated reading time under the note title.",
  "author": "Your Name",
  "slots": { "notes.header": "templates/badge.njk" },
  "noteSettings": ["dgReadingTime"]
}

{% if settings.dgReadingTime === true %}
<div class="reading-time">{{ ((content | striptags).split(" ").length / 200) | round }} min read</div>
{% endif %}

id, name, version, description, author are required. Everything else is optional. All declared paths must be relative, use /, and contain no .. — a violation makes the loader (and installers) reject the plugin.

Slots

Slot templates are plain Nunjucks fragments (no front matter). They are rendered with the full Eleventy data cascade — meta, settings, title, tags, created, updated, content, collections, graph, filetree, page — plus pluginSettings (this plugin's resolved settings). Always self-gate on your own setting: every enabled plugin's slots render unconditionally.