If your plugin requires more than just a landing page with a list of features, publish user-facing documentation either as a separate website or under the Documentation tab of your plugin's page.
Unlike Custom pages, the Documentation tab is not a single page, but a full-fledged help instance with a structure, table of contents, and in-topic navigation. Here are examples of plugins with a Documentation tab: Grazie Professional, Rust, and Edu Tools.
Why you should consider investing in writing documentation for your plugin:
Documentation makes your plugin more discoverable and searchable. When product documentation is online, external search engines will bring it to everyone who types the keywords into the search query.
Documentation helps you effectively communicate the features of a plugin, allowing your users to understand how it works from the start.
Documentation is a good way to support your current users. If they find answers in the documentation, this will decrease your support load, which is crucial for smaller teams.
Comprehensive and well-structured documentation often translates to a higher rating for the plugin.
To create documentation for your plugin, install the Writerside plugin for IntelliJ IDEs and start writing inside your development environment.
You can combine the simplicity of Markdown with fully structured semantic markup like collapsible chapters, code blocks, snippets with filters, tabs, and much more. Writerside has a built-in live preview that displays the docs exactly as they will appear on the web, while also offering the ability to build docs locally.
For more information, see the Writerside plugin help.
Alternatively, you can use this quick step-by-step guide:
Install the Writerside plugin.
Create a new documentation project alongside your plugin's code repository or in a separate docs repository.
Add topics with content, use the live preview, and various writing assistance features.
Build and publish the result.
You can build the documentation website locally and publish it to a server yourself or automate the process via GitHub, GitLab, or TeamCity Cloud. JetBrains also provides a dedicated TeamCity cloud instance that you can use to build and publish your plugin docs under the Documentation tab on your plugin's page in Marketplace.
Publish plugin documentation to MarketplaceThe Marketplace TeamCity Cloud instance enables you to build your plugin's documentation and publish it to your plugin's page in Marketplace. You need to register there and request configurations for building and publishing your documentation. We will grant you access for running the configurations.
Create a user account on marketplace.teamcity.com.
Submit a ticket for the Writerside team to create the necessary configurations for you. Provide the following information:
Your pluginâs ID.
You can find it in the URL of your plugin's page in Marketplace. For example the Writerside plugin ID is 20158.
A link to the repository with your documentation sources.
It must be a public repository for our build configuration to be able to clone it.
The name of the ZIP archive with the website artifact.
You can run a local build and see the name of the produced archive. For example, the archive with the Writerside help is webHelpWRS2.zip, where WRS is the instance name wrs in capital letters. In your case, replace WRS with your instance name in capital letters.
Your Marketplace TeamCity instance user account name from step 1 and an email of the contact person responsible for your documentation if it is different from the account name.
The Writerside team will create the necessary configurations: build your documentation, deploy to Marketplace staging, and deploy to Marketplace production. They will grant permissions for the provided account to run those configurations.
Once you publish the documentation, it will appear in the Documentation tab of your plugin's page in Marketplace.
Last modified: 27 January 2025
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