A Guide to Plugin GUIs/Lua Widgets

This week I learned how to use Plugin GUIs/Lua Widgets! They’re super awesome and I love them, so here’s another tutorial on how to use them. Feel free to ask questions, as always.

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I’ve tried this, and I sadly can’t get it to work to have at least my textbutton show up. The window opens, and that’s it:

local interface = plugin:CreateDockWidgetPluginGui(
	"Install BloxTech",
	DockWidgetPluginGuiInfo.new(
		Enum.InitialDockState.Float,
		true,
		true,
		400,
		500,
		400,
		500
	)
)

interface.Title =  "Install BloxTech"
script.TextButton:Clone().Parent = interface
script:WaitForChild("TextButton").Parent = interface 

Structure:
image

Result:

Thanks in advance for the help!

2 Likes

I’m honestly not sure why it wouldn’t work, although I’ll note that it seems like you’re putting two of the same object in the interface. Is that intentional?

script.TextButton:Clone().Parent = interface --clone the textbutton to the widget
script:WaitForChild("TextButton").Parent = interface --move the original to the widget

Also, is there any output?

1 Like

I have a similar problem. The plugin shows up white too. I get this error:
Plugin.lua:14: attempt to index global ‘script’ (a nil value)
This is the code:

Looks like it can’t reference itself, aka the script, for some reson.

1 Like

That’s a pretty odd bug. For now, I’ve figured out that you can work around the issue by encasing the script inside of a folder or some other container and then publishing the container as the plugin:
image

Also, for future reference, you can paste code blocks in a readable format with three tick marks (`), followed by “lua” (the programming language), then your code, and then three more tick marks:

--this is properly formatted code
local var="hi"
print(var)

image

2 Likes

Thanks for the reply. However, your solution did not work :frowning:
When I right click the folder and click “Save as Local Plugin”, the following output is being sent:

Plugin successfully saved as C:/Users/MEEEE/AppData/Local/Roblox/Plugins/Plugin.rbxmx
Refreshing plugin...

But when I go to that directory, no file is added.
I also tried changing the saving directory and it did not work…
I tried exporting a script as a plugin from the same game and it worked fine.

1 Like

That’s very odd, and definitely not intended behavior… you might want to file a bug report.

I’m a little late to the party but this is one of the only good tutorials I can find on making widget plugins. Thanks so much for this! It really helped!

3 Likes

I tried this a little differently and got it to work:
Workspace:
image
Script contents:

local dockWidget = plugin:CreateDockWidgetPluginGui(
	"Install BloxTech",
	DockWidgetPluginGuiInfo.new(
		Enum.InitialDockState.Float,
		true,
		true,
		400,
		500,
		400,
		500
	)
)
local model = script.Parent -- My Plugin Model
local gui = model.ScreenGui
gui:WaitForChild("TextButton")
local textButton = gui.TextButton

dockWidget.Title = "Install BloxTech"
textButton:Clone().Parent = dockWidget

Make sure that you save the model containing both your script and your GUI elements as the RBXM. There’s a bug that I’m fixing in Studio where when you right click and save a script as a plugin that said script is saved as Lua and not a Model. This only works if your script has no dependencies on GUI elements. The workaround is to use a Model or other container above your script and save it as a plugin from that. I renamed mine “My Plugin Model” for clarity.

Also, don’t take my code above as example level code - I’m just following the pattern I see you using and mildly renaming stuff trying for clarity.

7 Likes

That helped, thanks a lot! :smile: :sunny: :sunny:

I managed to export the plugin by chosing a directory outside of my user. Perhaps that’s because my user’s name has cyrillic letters in it, there were a few programs that got messed up because of that, but just saving the plugin into a separate directory right in the drive worked fine. Thanks for your guide by the way, it was extremely helpful and, perhaps, the simplest one out there :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

1 Like

Hi there !

I have a question : I would like to make the GUI appear when you click the button in a toolbar but I dont know how to change the DockWidgetPluginGui properties.

Thanks in advance,
Fabrice :wink:

I don’t know if you are still having problems with this, but I just made a plugin like this and it worked for me. The fix was to highlight everything inside of the script as well as the script itself when publishing.

3 Likes