Getting started

Plug-ins are a way of integrating third-party content into Haiilo Home, allowing a seamless display of information and extending the features Haiilo Home offers. It is an important concept and yet another powerful way to customize the functionality of a Haiilo Home installation. Plug-ins can be as simple or as complicated as you need them to be, depending on what you want to do. The simplest possible plug-in is a static web site.

Plug-in architecture

Plug-ins are independent small web applications that are hosted separately from Haiilo Home. A plug-in is not limited to the integration in a specific Haiilo Home instance but can be used in many different installations. It is completely up to the plug-in developer how complex the plug-in is and how and with which technology it is implemented. Each plug-in is embedded into Haiilo Home via iFrames and the exact details on how that works is described in the sections below.

Plug-in manifest and entry points

The plug-in manifest is a JSON file that contains all relevant information to install a plug-in in a Haiilo Home environment. Each plug-in must therefore necessarily have at least one plug-in manifest. Although Haiilo Home stores a local copy of the manifest in the database when a plug-in is installed, it makes sense to host and publish the manifest under the same domain as the plug-in.

To cater for different views of a single plug-in, Haiilo Home offers the concept of entry points. Each entry point belongs to the overarching plug-in and shares the same data but defines its own URL endpoint. While the plug-in itself is configured in Haiilo Home’s administration area, the specific entry point to render can be configured on each individual plug-in instance in Haiilo Home. If your plug-in defines only one entry point Haiilo Home will automatically select and render it.

You can read more about the manifest and the concept of entry points in the Manifest section.