Managing Confluence plugins

Finding macros, integrating multimedia content and now managing your plugins. This is the third in a series of blogs about my 5 top tips on how to make life with Confluence run as smoothly as possible and they're all things I wish I knew when I first started using it.

The trick to managing Confluence plugins is to make sure you strike the right balance between maximising their almost limitless potential and not compromising on overall performance.

Confluence plugins make it more powerful

Plugins really are what makes Confluence such a versatile sharing platform. Most macros come from them. They can be exceptionally powerful and they perform a huge variety of necessary tasks from analysing large amounts of data to integrating systems to completely changing the look and feel of Confluence. The expansion, development and customisation opportunities they offer means that they are used by almost every system administrator.

But plugins should come with a warning

While plugins are essential and add so much to Confluence, I nonetheless want to issue a warning that their mismanagement can cause serious performance issues, corrupt your data and even open up security holes.

The key to avoiding these risks is to ensure you manage your plugins as you would do with any other piece of software, applying your standard production development lifecycle and employing both automated and end-usertesting in separated representative environments. Don't assume that because they're just an add-on that they can't have system-wide impact.

Finally, take care to monitor your systems carefully in fact, monitor everything! You can never be too careful when introducing new plugins, as the amount of chaos they can cause in the event something does go wrong is simply not worth the risk of not doing so.

Alongside a range of powerful plugins available from the Atlassian Marketplace, Adaptavist can help you manage your plugins or even build custom plugins to give you the exact functionality you need contact us for more information.