Overview of Building a Zoho Creator Extension
What Does This Page Cover?
Learn how you can distribute or even monetize your widgets to a large audience by publishing them as extensions in Zoho Marketplace.
Availability
- Support for building extension is available in all datacenters.
Overview
Extensions are software addons that can be installed in your Creator application to provide additional functionality or features. They allow users to customize their application and enhance the user experience with new additions.
These are developed by different Zoho users to cater to a variety of unique requirements using Zoho Developer platform and can be consumed by anyone who has a Creator account. Zoho Marketplace can serve as a central location to which a developer can publish their extensions and have the benefit of an established customer base.
Note: Currently, a developer can only publish widgets as extensions for Zoho Creator.
Business use cases
Let's consider a few business situations in which the extensions can be built.
- Publish a progress bar widget as extension: A progress bar is a common requirement for any task tracking application that can help visualize the trend and progress with just a glance. You can build a custom progress bar widget beautified using HTML and CSS and publish it as extension. A user who is in need of such functionality can search for and install this extension from the Marketplace. You can even take this one step further and monetize your widget by publishing it as a paid extension.
- Publish a live tracking widget as extension: A shipment-tracking widget can be of use for a variety of applications, including order management, food delivery, ambulance request application, and many more. You can build and publish your own location tracking extension that displays real-time location in a map. All the users who installed your extension through Zoho Marketplace will indirectly be your clients.
Pre-requisites
To develop an extension, you’ll have to set up your Zoho Developer account to access Zoho Sigma. Sigma is an extension development platform where you can build and publish extensions for various Zoho applications.
Limitations
- This feature doesn't have multi DC support yet. For example, an extension built and published by a US DC developer can only be accessed and installed by a US DC user.
- The maximum file size of the widget that can be uploaded in Zoho Sigma is 10MB.