Building an Extension System on the Web

Arek Nawo
12 min readAug 6, 2023

Building an extension system on the Web is not an easy task. In an environment full of quirks and various security weak points to be aware of, an extension system becomes more of a liability than a feature. However, when executed well, a good extension system can bring a ton of value to your Web app, expanding not only its functionality but also potential use cases.

That’s why I was really excited to try and bring such functionality to Vrite — an open-source headless CMS for technical content — with the goal of making content delivery easier, the editing experience more customizable, and Vrite as a whole — more versatile.

While it is still pretty early, I’m excited to announce the first results of this work in the form of Dev.to and Hashnode auto-publishing Vrite Extensions.

Dev.to and Hashnode - first Vrite Extensions

In this blog post, I’d like to provide a short overview of the research and development behind this extension system and give you a first look at these new Vrite Extensions. Let’s jump in.

Building Extension Systems on the Web

Before you start building an extension system you need to have at least a basic…

--

--

Arek Nawo

Hobbyist. Programmer. Dreamer. JavaScript and TypeScript lover. 👍 World-a-better-place maker. 🌐 https://areknawo.com