What Add-Ons Are

Extending Statamic's core power.

Add-ons extend what Statamic is able to do. Whether they provide you with new tags for use in your templates or new ways to enter and save content in the Control Panel, Statamic’s add-on system makes it easy for anyone to install, update, and use add-ons.

Most of the time, the add-ons you use will be one or both of the following:

• Plugins create new tags for you to use within templates
• Fieldtypes create new fieldtypes for you to use in your fieldsets

One add-on can contain multiple new tags for you to use, as well as a fieldtype for the Control Panel.

What Add-Ons Can Do

Add-ons can do pretty much anything that’s possible with PHP. The add-on architecture is a couple of structured PHP objects, but within those objects developers can go crazy.

Want to read and store RSS feeds for displaying on the site? No problem. Want to access content from within a database? Even that’s possible.

While you’ll need to know PHP to build an add-on, using them is just like all other things in Statamic: no PHP knowledge needed. Using and configuring tags created by plugins is done through Statamic template tags, while using and configuring fieldtypes is done through YAML.

And even if you only know a little bit of PHP, you might be surprised how easy it is to create your own add-on.