Intro to the Plugin Ecosystem

Since a Headless CMS is essentially just a hosted API for all your content, the possibilities of what you can build with one are pretty endless - websites, dishwasher screen UIs, OOH displays, life-size livestream of a Catan game - anything.

This also means that a Headless CMS should allow you to unlock crazier use-cases that go beyond slug generation and SEO to things like AI tagging, product picking, or metadata stitching (and anything else you can think of).

If we provided every possibility natively through the core product, RIP bandwidth and brains trying to create and digest all the possibilities. So we have plugins, which are a fundamental feature to extensibility and integrations within DatoCMS, allowing install to use and/or create new possibilities using simple React apps.

Our Plugin ecosystem lists out publicly available plugins for common use-cases like Content Calendars, Web Previews, and Product Pickers, but you can also create private plugins for very specific things you'd need.

Need a 3D sprite picker for an in-game event? Make a plugin. Need a voice generator to read you your content entries with some lo-fi background music while you're writing them? Make a plugin. Need AI to fill out all your content for you to just hit publish? Make a plugin. You get the idea.

Plugins are available across DatoCMS, letting you customize your views via sidebar plugins (like Web Previews), field plugins (like a Star Rating picker), or full-screen plugins (like a Content Calendar).