Featured Community Plugin: Who's That Pokémon?
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.
Who's That Pokémon? Plugin
Community member Sriniketh (Discord: amelogenin) created the Who's That Pokémon? plugin; here are their words on how it was created.
Why did you want this plugin to exist?
I was an early adopter and was so excited to receive my TRMNL that I started thinking about what I'd want to see on it every day. When I dove into the docs to learn how to build plugins, I needed a fun dataset to work with, and that's when I thought of Pokémon. I grew up watching the show, and one thing that always stuck with me was the "Who's That Pokémon?" segment during commercial breaks. They'd show a Pokémon's silhouette and challenge viewers to guess who it was. I wanted to recreate that little moment of nostalgia: glancing at my TRMNL and seeing a random Pokémon each day, just like the show used to do.
Why were you the person to make it?
Honestly, anyone could have made this. I thought it would be fun to learn the platform by building something that's inherently fun to me. As a developer, I also wanted to be thoughtful about the technical details. I initially used a webhook, but switched to polling since the data only changes once a day and it meant zero configuration for users. That ease of setup made it a natural fit for a recipe. It was a good excuse to tinker and learn how TRMNL plugins work end to end.
Were you inspired by any other recipes or plugin creators?
Absolutely. The community and Discord were a huge inspiration. I saw so many creative plugins that displayed something unique each day: Piet Mondrian generative art, Marvel character of the day, Calvin and Hobbes. That format of "one delightful thing per day" really resonated with me and made me think about what my version of that could be. I built this for fun and didn't anticipate so many people relating to it. It has way more installs than I could have imagined and was even featured in the TRMNL X video. Fun fact: the random selection has surfaced Gumshoos four times now, making it the unofficial mascot of the plugin!
How did you balance look vs functionality?
I wanted it to be simple but give me some extra details beyond just the name so I could improve my Pokémon knowledge. The image had to be front and center, so when the plugin is used as part of a mashup, details like abilities disappear but the image stays. That was a deliberate tradeoff.
Did you learn anything that you want to apply to future or past recipes?
Keep the infrastructure simple. A GitHub Action that runs once a day and commits a JSON file is about as low maintenance as it gets.
What, if any, challenges did you face while creating it?
I'm one of those who has searched "how to center a div" far too many times. So I spent quite a bit of time getting the UI to scale well across mashups without the image getting cut off. It was a lot of trial and error, but that's part of the fun.
What part of the TRMNL Framework, Liquid filters, or other documentation was most helpful?
I was impressed by how much tooling was already in place when I developed the plugin. I didn't even have my device yet, but I could use tools like trmnlp to get started with plugin development. The docs were well put together and helped me understand the finer details, including how refresh intervals affect battery life. That kind of context made it easier to make informed decisions about how the plugin should work.