Chapter 8: Using and Building Plugins

In this chapter, we will explore Strapi plugins. Plugins open unlimited possibilities for Strapi—they allow us to expand Strapi with new capabilities and functionality in a way that is reusable to avoid reinventing the wheel, and they also allow us to tap into the experiences of the larger Strapi open-source community. This functionality ranges from the basics of maintaining content, augmenting it with comments, to advanced use cases such as migrating data or syncing roles and permissions between environments. We will solve two common requirements that can be tackled using plugins. The first is enabling GraphQL for our API (short for application programming interface), which is becoming an increasingly popular alternative to REpresentational State Transfer (REST) APIs. The second is sending emails from Strapi.

Here are the topics that we will cover in this chapter:

• Strapi plugin ecosystem
• Installing and using plugins from...