More and more frequently we have found ourselves writing small plugins to demonstrate how a new feature can be added to Highcharts without adding it (and bloating) the core software. On UserVoice a common reply to a feature request is to present a plugin. So we decided that these small snippets should be structured and presented to the public in a more systematic way, not only to provide features, but also to display how flexible and extendible Highcharts really is, and to invite our huge community to participate with their own plugins. Since version 2.3 Highcharts has been solely built on the prototype pattern, in practice making every method of the code base extendible from the outside. This allows for a flexible plugin architecture where Highcharts can be tweaked and bent in any direction.
We invite anyone with an idea of a plugin to contribute. We were inspired by the jQuery team and created a plugin system where each plugin is hosted in its own repo on GitHub. A post-receive hook is added to the repo to report changes in the plugin to our site, a manifest is added to provide information to our site. See Create your own plugin for the full details on creating and deploying.
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