Backstage Weekly 94 - Recent/Top components, Custom plugins, and BackstageCon is coming up

Hi y’all! I was out for holidays and now there’s a bunch of updates I’m excited to share:

• New homepage widget: Recent/Top visited components
• Improved Contributing Guidelines
• New article: Custom plugins
• BackstageCon is around the corner!

Custom plugins in Backstage

The key behind a successful Backstage adoption is how well you’re solving the problems your organization is facing. And because every organization is unique, there’s no Internal Developer Portal that can cover all your use cases out of the box.

That’s when Backstage comes to the rescue: you can extend it to make it your own! In my newest article for The New Stack, I introduce this idea and show a few examples. Check it out!

Want to start building on top of Backstage? Get a Roadie Backstage instance so you can start shipping features into your IDP without having to manage an instance. Get a demo now!

Custom plugins in Roadie

Talking about custom plugins, Roadie recently released new tooling that lets customers develop and set their plugins live. Here are some advantages:

• Get a live instant preview IN your Backstage instance while developing the plugin
• Consume Backstage and third-party APIs as React hooks with built-in auth—no more fetch nagging or re-working authentication—.
• Deploy your plugin and see it live within seconds!

Learn more about how Roadie streamlined custom plugins.

Recent and Top visited components

Developers Portal can get quite large, but you most likely frequent only a few pages. Thanks to aitherios, you can now add a widget to your homepage that will keep track of those frequently visited pages for you.

The widget lets you to track visits either through a local storage or an API. Check out the widget’s documentation for more information.

This feature will be released as part of Backstage 1.19, scheduled for October 17th.

Contributing guidelines

Hacktoberfest is here! And very timely, the Backstage team streamlined the Contributing Guidelines based on feedback from the community over Discord. In this guide, you can find all the information you need to get started contributing from local setup to a walkthrough of the reviewing process.

If you’re looking for an issue to contribute, check out the help wanted tag or join the i18n initiative!

BackstageCon is around the corner!

There’s a fantastic lineup of speakers at the annual Backstage gathering! Roadie is proud to have our CEO, David Tuite, talk about tips for a successful adoption. See you there!