*What Is A Confluence Plugin*
Confluence is an extensible wiki platform with an active developer community creating new capabilities, packaged as "plugins" that are attached to Confluence through a flexible and powerful plugin framework.
*About Third-Party Plugins*
Atlassian (the developers of Confluence) encourages developers to write plugins and share them with the rest of the Confluence community. This is great for Atlassian, because they can focus on the core functionality, while many RFEs can be resolved via plugins, often developed outside of Atlassian.
This approach brings some problems (of course). Many plugins were developed by hobbyist developers running their small, often home or internal instances of Confluence. Functionality was the main goal for these developers, while security and scalability wasn't high on their list. Combine that with a powerful plugin framework and you get a recipe for disaster. There have actually been incidents where large Confluence instances were taken down by a plugin that wasn't built with scalability in mind ([recent problems|http://forums.atlassian.com/thread.jspa?forumID=96&threadID=19177] at confluence.atlassian.com are a good example of this).
*The Plugins Policy*
* Though wikis.sun.com uses the Confluence platform, our installation contains only those [plugins |http://wikis.sun.com/display/About/Plugin+Status] that ship and are enabled in Confluence by default (with the exception of a small number of theme plugins that we disabled). wikis.sun.com is for all of Sun to share and leverage, with reliability, good performance, and security being key objectives.
* Requests to install / enable plugins will be considered but are not guaranteed. Approving a plugin for use on wikis.sun.com requires significant engineering resources (for example, testing and reviewing the source code), and our initial focus is providing a reliable and secure platform using "out of the box" functionality.
* You may add your request to the [Wikis Wish List]. This is placeholder for changes desired by the community, reviewed by the .Sun engineering team periodically and considered for future releases. You opinion matters to us, so be sure to use this channel to request the enhancements that you really want.
*A Final Note*
Atlassian realizes the current "trust issues" with their plugin model, and they plan to come up with a certification process that will "put a seal" on plugins that went through Atlassian's QA and/or are developed by external developers that proved themselves to Atlassian. Once this certification process is in place and is reliable, the plugin approval process on wikis.sun.com will be much easier for the engineering team and quicker for the requester.
Confluence is an extensible wiki platform with an active developer community creating new capabilities, packaged as "plugins" that are attached to Confluence through a flexible and powerful plugin framework.
*About Third-Party Plugins*
Atlassian (the developers of Confluence) encourages developers to write plugins and share them with the rest of the Confluence community. This is great for Atlassian, because they can focus on the core functionality, while many RFEs can be resolved via plugins, often developed outside of Atlassian.
This approach brings some problems (of course). Many plugins were developed by hobbyist developers running their small, often home or internal instances of Confluence. Functionality was the main goal for these developers, while security and scalability wasn't high on their list. Combine that with a powerful plugin framework and you get a recipe for disaster. There have actually been incidents where large Confluence instances were taken down by a plugin that wasn't built with scalability in mind ([recent problems|http://forums.atlassian.com/thread.jspa?forumID=96&threadID=19177] at confluence.atlassian.com are a good example of this).
*The Plugins Policy*
* Though wikis.sun.com uses the Confluence platform, our installation contains only those [plugins |http://wikis.sun.com/display/About/Plugin+Status] that ship and are enabled in Confluence by default (with the exception of a small number of theme plugins that we disabled). wikis.sun.com is for all of Sun to share and leverage, with reliability, good performance, and security being key objectives.
* Requests to install / enable plugins will be considered but are not guaranteed. Approving a plugin for use on wikis.sun.com requires significant engineering resources (for example, testing and reviewing the source code), and our initial focus is providing a reliable and secure platform using "out of the box" functionality.
* You may add your request to the [Wikis Wish List]. This is placeholder for changes desired by the community, reviewed by the .Sun engineering team periodically and considered for future releases. You opinion matters to us, so be sure to use this channel to request the enhancements that you really want.
*A Final Note*
Atlassian realizes the current "trust issues" with their plugin model, and they plan to come up with a certification process that will "put a seal" on plugins that went through Atlassian's QA and/or are developed by external developers that proved themselves to Atlassian. Once this certification process is in place and is reliable, the plugin approval process on wikis.sun.com will be much easier for the engineering team and quicker for the requester.