Featured Community Plugin - Supercars Drivers
This post is part of a series, featuring the incredible work of plugin authors who grow the TRMNL plugin ecosystem with every contribution. The TRMNL team has individually selected these plugins and authors to be featured.
Supercars Drivers
Community member Sam Sharp created the Supercars Drivers plugin; here are their words on how it was created.
Why did you want this plugin to exist?
I wanted this plugin to exist because Supercars is one of my favorite racing series and I liked the idea of having the standings visible in a clean, simple format while giving me one less excuse to check my phone. It also felt like a good addition to the marketplace because Australian sports had not yet been well represented. More broadly, it became part of a fun hobby of extending the project to cover the sports I enjoy that had not been built yet.
How did you balance look vs functionality?
Primarily wanted a clean and functional design so it's easily readable and makes use of all the screen real estate afforded by each device/layout. As I have begun to branch out and try new designs I've started to increase my use of images and more appealing design elements from the framework.
TRMNL OG
TRMNL X
Were you inspired by any other recipes or plugin creators?
Main inspirations on content and design were Daniel Sitnik's Formula 1 Races and Formula 1 Constructor Standings plugins.
What was your process for creating the plugin?
Was initially writing everything manually and updating static JSON as a PoC and test rendering on a real device. Recently getting a Github Copilot subscription and OpenCode has really sped up the building and testing. Incorporating the preview and API tools in the trmnlp repo has been especially helpful with iterating locally before easily updating all layouts through the API (once instating a beta plugin strategy to prevent over eager agents pushing changes to published recipes).
What, if any, challenges did you face while creating it?
The plugin categories were a bit buried in the docs so took me a while to find which values were allowed. Making changes to layout when they are relevant to multiple layouts/plugins got tedious when performing manually. Only gap I've found is the inability to adjust the custom fields easily through the preview GUI. I've written a wrapper to handle this when launching the preview but would be more convenient through the GUI. Would also be useful to access the Chef linter prior to requesting publishing.
Did you learn anything you want to apply to future recipes?
More rounded backgrounds / info tiles, icons and horizontal/rounded gauges. Also trying to think about more custom fields that may be useful and applying them to more devices and layouts as mine primarily focus on the v3 Full layout.
Is there a tip you would give to a new plugin developer?
Keep as close to the UI Framework as possible as some styling may appear to work in the preview but not once rendered on device. Try to think about how best to use all real estate afforded on each device and what custom fields might be useful/fun to incorporate early as refactoring later on can get tedious.
What is your favorite plugin that someone else created and why?
STRMNL Activity - Has been really satisfying seeing my activities stack as the week progresses and being laid out in a really nice format.