Craft Console

The challenge

Developers had been extending Craft with plugins since version 1, with no central place to distribute them. They handled payments and licensing themselves, and customers bought plugins on separate websites. The Plugin Store brought installing, buying and distributing plugins into one cohesive experience. Craft Console is the part of it that manages the licenses.

My role

For Craft Console, as for the in-app Plugin Store and the public marketplace, I wrote the specs, made the early sketches and the detailed mockups, listened to customer feedback, implemented the frontend, and connected the dots with the backend engineers building Console’s APIs.

I also knew the problem from the other side of the fence: a few years before, I was selling my own plugins through Gumroad.

Three surfaces, one system

The Plugin Store came in three places sharing one system.

• The in-app store sits inside Craft CMS, so installing or buying a plugin never takes you out of Craft.
• The marketplace is a public website, there for discovery and search engines.
• Craft Console is where customers manage licenses, orders and billing. Developers use it too, to publish plugins, link their Stripe account and follow their sales.

For customers: licenses, orders and billing

A plugin can be bought in the in-app store or on the marketplace. Either way, its license lives in Craft Console, next to the customer’s Craft licenses, their order history and their billing info. It’s also where a license is renewed for additional years of updates.

For developers: publishing and getting paid

Plugin developers use Console to publish their plugins, link their Stripe account to get paid, and follow their sales. They keep 80% of each sale, and Pixel & Tonic keeps 20% for providing the service.

plugins published, up from over 200 at launch

+1,000+1,000

paid to developers through September 2025

$9M+$9M+

of each sale goes to the developer

80%80%

24 hours before Craft 3

We had publicly committed to April 4, 2018, with a countdown. Craft 3 was an almost complete rewrite around a newer PHP framework, the engineers were deep in that transition, and the Plugin Store’s API came last, definitely a bit in a rush. We flew the whole team to Bend, Oregon, to spend a couple of weeks connecting the remaining pieces in one room.

About 24 hours out, we still had integration issues and API problems with buying and renewing plugins. I put the remaining UI refinements aside and focused entirely on functionality. People had to be able to buy a plugin and renew a license for additional years of updates, and that mattered more than a polished interface. We narrowed the last issue down to renewals, on the API side, so it could be fixed without holding back the CMS release.

Craft 3 launched on its public date, and new plugin purchases worked straightaway. Renewals ran in a degraded state for a few more hours, and the polish I had set aside shipped in the days after.

Organizations

Organizations let agencies manage their projects, licenses, plugins, and billing as a team. The idea came out of the brainstorming sessions we held with customers while rebuilding Craft Cloud, which is managed and run from Craft Console too: they wanted to work as a team on projects, with licenses and billing that belong to the organization.