Design Best Practices

Actions that apply to specific Channels 

• Recommendation: Have your plugin register the actions to the channel header. This makes it quickly accessible for users and the actions apply on the channel they’re viewing.
• Example: Zoom meeting posts to a channel

You can additionally register a slash command on the server-side to take channel-specific actions.

• Example: Jira project actions

Actions that apply to specific messages 

• Recommendation: Have your plugin register a post dropdown menu component with some text, icon and an action function. This adds your action to the “More Actions” post menu dropdown for easy discovery.
• Examples: Create or attach to Jira issue from a message; copy a message to another channel; report an inappropriate message

Actions related to files or images 

• Recommendation: Have your plugin register a file upload method with some text, icon and an action function. This adds your new action to the file upload menu.
• Examples: File sharing from OneDrive or GDrive; Draw plugin for sketches

Actions that apply to specific teams 

• Recommendation: Have your plugin register left sidebar header component with some text, icon and an action function. This adds your action above your team’s channels in the sidebar.
• Examples: Trello kanban board plugin, GitHub Plugin

Quick links or status summaries of workflows 

• Recommendation: Have your plugin register a bottom team sidebar component. This adds icons to the lower left corner of the UI.
• Examples: GitHub sidebar links with summary of outstanding reviews or unread messages; ServiceNow incident status summary

Global actions that can be taken anywhere in the server and not directly related to teams, channels or users 

• Recommendation: Have your plugin register main menu action with some text, icon for mobile, and an action function. This adds your action to the Main Menu. You can additionally register a slash command on the server-side.
• Examples: Share feedback plugin in Main Menu; /jira slash commands for quick actions

Actions that apply to specific users 

• Recommendation: Have your plugin register a popover user actions component. This adds your action button to the user profile popover.
• Examples: Report User plugin; Display extra information about the user from an LDAP server

Extra information on a user profile 

• Recommendation: Have your plugin register a popover user attribute component. This adds your custom attributes to the user profile popover.
• Examples: Custom User Attributes plugin

Actions related to emoji and GIFs 

• Recommendation: Have your plugin add a component to the emoji picker. This is not yet supported, but some work had previously started with the issue currently opened as Help Wanted.
• Examples: Bitmoji plugin; GIFs via Giphy or Gfycat