Hi Folks,

I'm new to October, so I may well be missing something.

As with many projects, I will need to extend the Backend / Admin area to include pages for managing features or requirements specific to that project.

Is developing plugins the best way to customise the Backend to implement this project specific business logic ?

Can a plugin be installed from the developer's local machine, rather than having to upload to GitHub first ?

Many thanks in advance.

Yes to both questions.

All plugins begin life in a local environment. While you should always use Git for your development projects, it's not a necessity if you're working on something specific to your website.

If you wish to submit the plugin to the marketplace, then I'd recommend using Github for free plugins, or BitBucket for paid plugins. You're welcome to submit zip files if you really want to, but using Git is by far the easiest method.

Even then, you're not restricted to Git and Bitbucket! Any Git provider will work, even self-hosted solutions like Gitlab. In fact, I use Gitlab CE myself to host the repository for Octoshop. You simply paste the git url into the Author admin on the October website and it takes care of the rest so you don't have to.

Hi freegleweb,

Thank you so much for such a detailed reply. That was really helpful.