While the Atlassian products and existing plugins give you an excellent foundation to start from, there are times where you need something extra to make the software work exactly the way you need it to – plugins!
Overview
Atlassian products, especially Confluence, have been designed to facilitate extensive customisation via plugins. The plugin subsystem provides extension points for practically everything - themes, content indexing, events, remote APIs, macros and more. We should know, we wrote part of that plugin architecture!
Bespoke pluigns are small, custom add-ons that tailor the product to your exact needs. In rare cases where the plugin architecture doesn't provide the required flexibility, you benefit from the fact that the product is a standard J2EE application based on industry standard open frameworks - there's almost always a way to make it do what you want and Adaptavist are experts in implementing your desires.
Whether it be a new report you want adding to the Statistical Analysis Plugin, a custom sign-up and login process or just about anything else, we can help.
Why use our Plugin Development service?
We are constantly developing new plugins, enhancing existing plugins and as long standing members of the developer community with customers in over 55 countries, there are few scenarios we can't handle.
Almost a third of all plugins developed for Atlassian products worldwide are written by Adaptavist, many of which are later released as open source. The Confluence Plugin Repository was originally developed by Adaptavist so if you've installed any plugins using it, you've already used one of our plugins. 
We have been working with Atlassian since before Confluence existed and have the most experienced engineers, external to Atlassian, that work with Atlassian products on a continual basis.
Parts of Confluence's plugin architecture were developed and enhanced by Adaptavist, for example the modifications to the resources servlet for improved caching and recursive library loading in the plugin manager to allow bundled libraries.
Award Winning Solutions
As Winner of the 2006 Atlassian Codegeist Contest, Adaptavist are more than capable of delivering first class solutions to meet your exact needs.
The Atlassian Plugin Repository, which won first prize, is now a core part of Confluence and contains a growing number of third party plugins that can be easily installed, upgraded and audited directly from within Confluence.
We generally enter the competition every 2 years (10 entries in the 2008 contest, the results of which will be announced in the coming weeks) but even in the years where we don't make an effort the few plugins we enter get notable mentions.
Try our plugins!
A large number of our customers take advantage of our open source discounts and allow their plugins to be released as open source - which is good for you because you can see examples of our past work.
Here's a few of our recent plugins:
You can find a list of all our publicly available plugins in the Confluence Plugin Repository - just type adaptavist in to the search box at the top Please note that those represent only a fraction of the plugins we've developed (many are highly bespoke and hidden away behind customer firewalls).
How does it work?
Well, first we'll need to know what your requirements are - create a sales enquiry ticket (you'll need to be logged in to see the "Create Issue" link at the top) and provide the following information where applicable:
- A summary of your requirements in as much detail as you feel necessary (we'll tell you if you're missing anything).
- Any specific conditions (such as target Confluence version, Java version etc), we'll assume the latest software versions unless specified otherwise.
- Any time constraints you have (e.g. start by & complete before dates)
We use our online issue tracker for all communications - it might be a bit daunting at first, but it's proved very reliable when compared to email.
We have in-depth knowledge of almost every plugin available for Confluence – if we know of an existing solution, we'll tell you about it thus saving time and money. One of the first things we do when you contact us is look for existing solutions that would meet your requirements.
- If we develop a plugin for you, you will always be given the source code upon final payment
- If you're willing to open source the plugins we develop for you, we'll contribute up to 20% of the development costs!
- If you allow us to put the results into a commercial product, we'll contribute up to 50% of the development costs!
Depending on the complexity of the plugin, it could take anything from a few days to weeks for us to gather all the required information so please factor in some "fact finding" time to your anticipated schedule.
What does it cost?
It depends how much time it takes to develop the plugin. We've worked on projects ranging from 8 hours for small plugins through to weeks and months. Our larger customers often utilise our services on an ongoing basis with projects spanning years.
We're not the cheapest company to use when compared by hourly rate, but we believe that the quality of our code, speed of development and grade of completeness makes our value clear.
Unlike most other vendors, we make our prices available up-front, so here they are...
| Item Code |
Description |
Cost |
| BSPK |
Bespoke plugin development |
£90 GBP per hour |
We offer discounts for larger projects and long-term customers, and up to 20% discount if you allow your plugins to be released as open source (at our discretion).
In some cases, plugins that are developed would be a perfect addition to some of our off-the-shelf commercial plugins (eg. Theme Builder or Community Bubbles) - we offer a 50% discount if you allow us to merge the functionality in to the commercial plugin and also give you full license to the plugin as an added bonus.
We typically ask for 50% or more to be paid up-front for new customers (no offence, we just like to know that you intend to pay for the work) although this can be negotiated and we are more flexible for long-term customers.
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