Community Plugin SDK Experiences
We are considering automation around our development process and would be interested in any experiences, both good and bad, from anyone who uses the Community Plugin SDK on a regular basis to help us...
Forum Discussion
Inactive User We are just brainstorming at this point. We have a dev server and a stage server. Just as you described, we currently do our updates in VS Code, then copy and paste into the Studio textareas on dev and then we manually copy/paste between dev and stage when we are ready for QA.
In looking at the continuous integration workflow at https://developer.khoros.com/khoroscommunitydevdocs/docs/sdk-developer-workflow , I believe we would want to set this up for both dev and stage such that we could merge code between dev and stage branches in Git and have that trigger a push to studio on Stage. Do you do anything like this in your environment?
You mentioned that the SDK can be a bit cumbersome. Does the push to Studio take long? Are there any hidden gotchas to look out for?
As for timeline, that would probably be sometime in December into January.
We don't have much info on Aurora at this time, so I really have no idea how that will impact our workflow. That is certainly something to consider.
Thank you for any wisdom you care to share. It is much appreciated!
Hi, sorry, I misunderstood -- I thought you were from Khoros asking about the future of the SDK.
But to answer your question, yes, that's the SDK workflow we use, and we do use Git as well in the workflow. It all works reasonably well -- except when it doesn't. There are occasional random issues that will require you opening a Support ticket.
Things to be aware of:
- Initial setup is often a pain and will cost you some time to get right. There are different issues you'll run into on Mac and Windows.
- You'll have to use an old version of Nodejs. If you use Node for anything else, I'd install Node Version Manager to help make the process of going back and forth easier. (I have to use a different version of Node than the SDK for Angular, Vue, and React).
- Push to studio takes about 3-7 minutes, depending on the day and the phase of the moon or the current temperature in Kalamazoo or the hog population in Arkansas that day. So it makes things a little longer to do. But easier than pasting into Studio.
- You have to renew your SDK plugin token monthly via Studio > Advanced > SDK > Plugin Token
- Make sure to set strictMode to false in the server.conf.json file. BUT be aware that if you have custom components, you'll occasionally need to set this to true to debug them, but then ignore the errors you get from Khoros' own components that fail on strict mode.
- Lots of things about the SDK are like that. A bit wonky, sometimes annoying, and random. But it's better than the alternative.
LMK if you need any further input or advice on this. It's a bit confusing to set up and use at first.
Inactive User Thank you, that is great feedback. I'll reach out if we have more questions as we get further along in our discussions.
