As part of SDL Tridion Sites 9.1 release, we first time introduced a new feature called Add-ons.

It brought multiple benefits to our customers like:

• No downtime to deploy extensions
  • Since Add-ons are loaded and updated on the fly
• Enabler for automated server deployments 
  • Add-on service expose public REST API
• Reduce the Total Cost of Ownership​
  • Speed up disaster recovery
• Enabler for Connector Framework
  • Allows you easily deploy connectors for both Content Manager and Content Delivery
• Improves visibility of the deployed extensions and their statuses
  • A single place to manage your deployed extensions

 In other words for developers and system engineers:

• No more manual deployment and configurations
• You can combine your business solution into a single package
  • For example, an Event Handler that exposes custom data to your list and UI extension to add an extra column can be deployed as a single add-on package
• One Add-on service can be used for a scale-out scenario
• Since Add-on service is a .Net Core application, it can be deployed on the Linux

If you are curious about the Add-on feature I would recommend you to take a look at a couple of recording available:

• Webinar related to Add-on service: 
• Presentation on Tridion Developer Summit: 374369509

Anyway, let’s not focus on the Add-on feature anymore and better talk about how you can develop your extensions using Add-ons.

To simplify development we are proposing a publicly available open-source Visual Studio plugin that you can download from: Visual studio plugin for Tridion Add-ons

It gives you a possibility to use templates for such public Content Manager extension points like Event Handler, UI Editor and Resolver. You can easily pre-fill all required Add-on manifest properties and combine multiple extension projects into a single add-on package as a post-build action.

Other public extension points as well as a possibility to upload to the local Add-on service are something we are looking to add in the future.

Sometimes it is better to see once than read multiple times. So you can take a look at the presentation from the last Tridion Expert Summit: 

Hope you enjoyed it and found it useful.  Expect to see you on the list of contributors.