plugin:OpenDevForumPage

As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to open URLs from the Roblox Developer Forum via plugin.

We have plugin:OpenWikiPage. But we don’t have a plugin:OpenDevForumPage function.

I find plugin:OpenWikiPage completely useless for plugin creators, unless you are a roblox staff, as you cannot create your own page on the roblox wiki. If we can access dev forum pages via plugins, we can do a lot more with the dev forum page.

A good use for this function would be having a ‘help’ button in your plugin that takes you to a tutorial about the plugin upon clicking the button. This can be very handy for complex plugins that new users haven’t used before.

If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because we can access dev forum posts via plugin.

60 Likes

Honestly, this is a needed feature. Usually, plugins have a release topic with the version. Meaning, for example, if we have a version number displayed somewhere in our plugin, then we can click it to “read more”, which brings us to the topic.

In addition, it’d be useful to have social media websites TBH. For example, Twitter can be used as a “contact me” button in case a little bug happens, or some minor assistance is needed instead of replying to the topic.

11 Likes

Bumping this as I still think this is a heavily needed feature that should at least be considered. Plugins are getting bigger and more complex. So having access to certain dev forum pages for help for the plugins would be incredibly useful

3 Likes

I would appreciate this. I have to make the user copy a forum link out of a text input for Studio Tweaks to accomplish this.

5 Likes

Plugins should be able to use OpenInBrowser actually. It already has trust-checking code built into it, afaik it only lets you access URLs with the pattern *.roblox.com/*, but I believe it could be expanded to trusted social media sites.

6 Likes

I agree with being able to open pages for trusted social media too; however, I believe the PolicyService will need to be expanded to allow checking that the current studio user is allowed to access those links?

This would be a great addition, since you can then give direct access to discord support servers for those users that are allowed to access social platforms.

1 Like

I would’ve actually used it for linking to a GitHub page as a help page for the plugin. Of course I could just embed it into the plugin but thats loads of extra steps.

4 Likes

This API doesn’t make a lot of sense because:

  • The API naming is too specific, e.g. if “devforum” ever changes its name then the API becomes confusing / may need to be deprecated in favor of a better-named sibling. (Same reason why OpenWikiPage sucks)
  • It’s too specific. Plugins wouldn’t benefit just from opening devforum pages, but other pages too. There are a few well-known plugins/frameworks that have their own documentation site they would want to open.
4 Likes