Plugin Categories & Capabilities

Every plugin in the Ever Works platform declares a category and one or more capabilities. The category determines how the platform classifies and displays the plugin, while capabilities define the interfaces the plugin implements and the operations it can perform.

Plugin Categories

Categories are defined as a single source of truth in @ever-works/plugin via the PLUGIN_CATEGORIES constant:

const PLUGIN_CATEGORIES = [
	'git-provider',
	'deployment',
	'screenshot',
	'search',
	'content-extractor',
	'data-source',
	'ai-provider',
	'pipeline',
	'form',
	'integration',
	'utility',
	'theme'
] as const;

type PluginCategory = (typeof PLUGIN_CATEGORIES)[number];

Each plugin declares exactly one category. The category is set on the plugin class and included in the plugin manifest.

Category Overview

Category	Description	Example Plugins
`ai-provider`	Provides AI model access for content generation	OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Groq, Ollama, Mistral, OpenRouter, Perplexity, Vercel AI Gateway
`search`	Web search for discovering work items	Exa, Tavily, SerpAPI, Brave
`content-extractor`	Extracts structured content from URLs	Jina, Firecrawl, Local Content Extractor, Notion Extractor, PDF Extractor
`screenshot`	Captures website screenshots	ScreenshotOne, Urlbox, Scrapfly
`git-provider`	Git hosting API operations and local git	GitHub
`deployment`	Deploys generated works to hosting platforms	Vercel
`data-source`	Imports items from external data APIs	Apify, Bright Data, Scrapfly, Valyu
`pipeline`	Defines the generation workflow	Standard Pipeline (15 steps), Agent Pipeline (5 steps), Claude Code
`form`	Provides custom form fields for the generator UI	(used by pipeline plugins via `IFormSchemaProvider`)
`integration`	Third-party service integrations	(extensible)
`utility`	General-purpose utilities	Comparison Generator
`theme`	Visual theme customization	(extensible)

Plugin Capabilities

Capabilities are the functional interfaces a plugin implements. A plugin can declare multiple capabilities. For example, the Exa plugin declares both search and content-extractor capabilities.

Capability Constants

const PLUGIN_CAPABILITIES = {
	AI_PROVIDER: 'ai-provider',
	SEARCH: 'search',
	SCREENSHOT: 'screenshot',
	CONTENT_EXTRACTOR: 'content-extractor',
	DATA_SOURCE: 'data-source',
	PIPELINE: 'pipeline',
	PIPELINE_MODIFIER: 'pipeline-modifier',
	FORM_SCHEMA_PROVIDER: 'form-schema-provider',
	DEPLOYMENT: 'deployment',
	GIT_PROVIDER: 'git-provider',
	OAUTH: 'oauth'
} as const;

Capability Interfaces

Each capability maps to a TypeScript interface that the plugin must implement:

Capability	Interface	Required Methods
`ai-provider`	`IAiProviderPlugin`	`createChatCompletion()`, `listModels()`, `getModel()`, `isAvailable()`, `getCapabilities()`
`search`	`ISearchPlugin`	`search()`, `isAvailable()`
`content-extractor`	`IContentExtractorPlugin`	`extract()`, `isAvailable()`
`screenshot`	`IScreenshotPlugin`	`capture()`, `isAvailable()`
`data-source`	`IDataSourcePlugin`	`query()`, `isAvailable()`
`pipeline`	`IPipelinePlugin`	`getStepDefinitions()`, `execute()`
`pipeline-modifier`	`IPipelineModifierPlugin`	`execute()`, `targetPipelines`
`git-provider`	`IGitProviderPlugin`	`getAuth()`, `getCloneUrl()`, `createRepository()`, `getRepository()`, `createPullRequest()`, `mergePullRequest()` + `IGitOperations`
`deployment`	`IDeploymentPlugin`	`deploy()`, `getDeploymentStatus()`
`oauth`	`IOAuthPlugin`	`getOAuthConfig()`, `exchangeCode()`, `getUser()`
`form-schema-provider`	`IFormSchemaProvider`	`getFormFields()`, `getFormGroups()`

Type Guards

The plugin system provides type guard functions for each capability:

import {
	isAiProviderPlugin,
	isSearchPlugin,
	isContentExtractorPlugin,
	isScreenshotPlugin,
	isDataSourcePlugin,
	isPipelinePlugin,
	isPipelineModifierPlugin,
	isGitProviderPlugin,
	isDeploymentPlugin
} from '@ever-works/plugin';

// Usage in facade or platform code
if (isSearchPlugin(plugin)) {
	const results = await plugin.search({ query: 'example' });
}

Selectable Provider Categories

Certain capabilities are selectable in the generator form UI. These are defined by SELECTABLE_PROVIDER_CATEGORIES:

const SELECTABLE_PROVIDER_CATEGORIES = {
	search: { capability: 'search', uiKey: 'search', selectableInForm: true },
	screenshot: { capability: 'screenshot', uiKey: 'screenshot', selectableInForm: true },
	ai: { capability: 'ai-provider', uiKey: 'ai', selectableInForm: true },
	contentExtractor: { capability: 'content-extractor', uiKey: 'contentExtractor', selectableInForm: true },
	pipeline: { capability: 'pipeline', uiKey: 'pipeline', selectableInForm: true }
} as const;

When a user creates a work, they can select which plugin to use for each selectable category. Plugins that declare defaultForCapabilities in their manifest are pre-selected.

Plugin Visibility

Each plugin can set a visibility level in its manifest:

Visibility	Behavior
`public`	Shown to all users in all plugin lists (default)
`hidden`	Never shown in the plugin UI; used for internal infrastructure plugins
`user-only`	Shown in user plugin settings but not in work plugin lists

Supplementary Plugins

Plugins with supplementary: true in their manifest are excluded from manual provider selection dropdowns. They still declare their capability and auto-activate through URL-based routing in the facade layer. This is used for narrow-scope extractors like the Notion Extractor (activates only for notion.so URLs) and the PDF Extractor (activates only for .pdf URLs).

Multi-Capability Plugins

A single plugin can implement multiple capabilities. This is common for search and content extraction:

Plugin	Capabilities
Exa	`search`, `content-extractor`
Tavily	`search`, `content-extractor`
Firecrawl	`search`, `content-extractor`
Bright Data	`search`, `content-extractor`
Scrapfly	`screenshot`, `content-extractor`
GitHub	`git-provider`, `oauth`
Standard Pipeline	`pipeline`, `form-schema-provider`
Agent Pipeline	`pipeline`, `form-schema-provider`

When a plugin provides multiple capabilities, the manifest's defaultForCapabilities array specifies which capabilities it should be the default provider for:

// A plugin with multiple capabilities, default for only one
{
  capabilities: ['search', 'content-extractor'],
  defaultForCapabilities: ['search']
}

Configuration Modes

Every plugin declares a configurationMode that determines how its settings are managed:

Mode	Description
`admin-only`	Only platform admins can configure the plugin
`user-required`	Each user must provide their own credentials (e.g., API keys)
`hybrid`	Admins set global defaults; users can override with their own values

Most AI provider plugins use user-required since users provide their own API keys. Infrastructure plugins like GitHub use hybrid with admin-level OAuth app credentials and user-level tokens.