Introduction

Please note: This article only applies to customers who host their Claromentis intranet on their own server (on-premise). 

We’re making some changes to our framework that will affect legacy plugins that have been built and maintained by our on-premise customers.  

What’s happening?

Occasionally, when carrying out routine support work or upgrades, we notice that some on-premise customers have written their own custom plugins. While we do know of historical cases where some customers have built their own plugins, this was done under the full understanding that our teams cannot support these plugins in any way.

Throughout Claromentis 9, we’re going to be making some changes and improvements to the core Claromentis framework that are expected to make these plugins unstable and, eventually, unusable. As a result of this, any on-premise customer currently maintaining their own plugins should expect that they will no longer work after the core system has been upgraded to Claromentis 9.

These changes will not affect custom plugins that were produced by our own Custom Development team.

I created my own custom plugin. What do I need to do?

If you do have plugins or code in your system that wasn’t produced by Claromentis, there are several options going forward:

1. We’re always adding new features to our core framework. This means that the original specifications of your custom plugin could now be met by our core system. Please review your plugin requirements and consider whether your needs could now be met within our core framework.
2. We support a wide range of RESTful APIs that could replace your custom plugin.  Take a look at our ever-growing list here: https://developer.claromentis.com/latest/
3. We provide a selection of pre-built plugins and add-ons on our Marketplace, which could replace your existing custom plugins. Take a look at Marketplace here: https://discover.claromentis.com/pages/marketplace
4. Our in-house Custom Development team can build a custom plugin to replace yours. We will meet your existing requirements but build the plugin in line with our tried-and-trusted methodologies, which means your custom plugin will be supported in all future versions of Claromentis. You can submit a Change Request here: https://discover.claromentis.com/forms/changes/add

Please note: Option 4 is chargeable and will require a full specification of the plugins’ functionality. This is because the code alone is not enough for us to onboard and support these solutions with effective QA going forward. 

What about custom plugins that were created by Claromentis?

If your custom work was produced by Claromentis as the result of a Change Request then no action is required. In this case, we know the details of the work carried out and will bring this up-to-date with the latest version as part of our Upgrade and QA processes, and your Claromentis custom plugins will still work as normal.

The future of customer plugins

We do understand that there’s demand for customer-led custom code solutions within the Claromentis ecosystem. In response to this, the Claromentis team has been working very hard to expand our API offering. However, bespoke custom modules and plugins can still be developed by our Custom Development Team.

In the very long term, it is our hope that we will be able to provide a safe, maintainable, powerful, and well-documented methodology for customer-led plugins and modules to be developed. We’ll keep you posted as and when our plans develop!

If you have any questions or concerns please don’t hesitate to reach out to our Support team who will be happy to help.