Hello and welcome to the articy:draft X Basics tutorial series. In this lesson we take a look at the customizability of articy through plugins.
Plugin Manager
You can open the Plugin Manager via the master toolbar.
It serves as an easy to use hub to activate or deactivate plugins as needed. It let’s you keep the overview about what plugins are installed, and let’s you install additional custom plugins.
You will notice that there are already some plugins listed here, even with a fresh articy:draft installation. These are the free official Articy Software plugins. We will take a look at this list in a moment, but first I’d like to go over the elements of the Plugin Manager.
On the left is the plugin icon (1) and below that a slider to either activate or deactivate it (2). Please note that you can open the Plugin Manager in the Welcome Screen or inside of a project, but you can only make changes to plugins – activate or deactivate them – when you opened the Plugin Manager from the Welcome Screen. When inside a project, you can check the state of your plugins, but cannot make changes!
The middle column holds the name and description of the plugin plus additional information like version number, installation folder and so forth (3). If you click an entry it will expand. On the right side we see the state of the plugin (4).
A green checkmark in the welcome screen means the plugin is fully functional, inside the project that it is fully functional and active. A red exclamation mark in the welcome screen signalizes that there is a conflict! Click the plugin entry for more details. Inside the project it stands for a plugin that is set to inactive. Or if the plugin is supposed to be active it also signalizes a conflict. The third state is a yellow icon with a download symbol. It means the plugin is functional, but there is an update available. It will show the new available version, just click to update.
Deactivated plugins will be displayed with a slightly darker background.
At the top we have a general info area (1). Here you can see at a quick glance how many plugins are installed, if there are updates available, or if any conflicts appeared. With the button on the bottom left, you can install custom plugins from a file or an http address (2).
Plugins
The AI Extensions (1), Localization and voice-over export / import (2), and Loca statistics report (3) plugins are needed for the corresponding articy features. Only deactivate these plugins if you are sure that you don’t want to use these features at all!
The Auto Assign Template (1) plugin is helpful if you like to assign templates right when creating objects. The Re-apply Color from Template (2) plugin sets the current object color to the template default color. Assets to Entities (3) is a plugin that allows to automatically create entities from a group of selected assets. Re-apply Color from Template and Assets to Entities are deactivated by default. Activate them in the Plugin Manager to use them. Find videos explaining how to use these plugins here.
Macro Dev Kit
You can write your own custom plugins to integrate and extend functionality of articy:draft X with the free Macro Dev Kit or MDK, for short.
The Articy DevKit Tools plugin provides some useful helpers if you want to write your own MDK plugin or API program.
Check out the DevKit documentation for more infos about writing plugins.
You can download the source code for most of our official plugins and use them as an example how plugins are structured, or you can modify them to better fit your specific use cases.
Useful links:
Plugin videos
articy:draft X DevKit documentation
Articy plugins source code
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