XD 18 plugin changes -- "develop" folder has moved!

Adobe XD UXP Plugin API
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XD 18 was released today with a number of changes and improvements for plugins:

  • develop folder location change (Mac only) – The “Adobe XD CC” folder was renamed to just “Adobe XD.” The contents of the develop folder will automatically be moved to the new location the first time you launch XD 18.

  • More text field controls – <input> types password, number, and search

  • Inline CSS in HTML – Inline style attributes work when using innerHTML

  • More CSS pseudo-classes – :focus and :lang()

  • Send FormData with XHR – This provides an easy way to post data to an endpoint expecting multipart/form-data. (But uploading binary files with Blob is not supported yet – use ArrayBuffer if your backend supports it).

  • requestAnimationFrame() for UI – Complimenting the earlier addition of setTimeout() APIs, this new global API makes it easier to use certain UI libraries such as “react-virtualized” with fewer polyfills.

  • Bug fixes for UI, network, and file IO APIs (see changelog below for full list).

    • If you are using checkboxes with React one of these fixes may change the behavior of your code.

For further details on these API changes, see the updated changelog page or this complete diff of all docs changes.

Note: If you build a plugin that uses these new API capabilities, consider whether it’s possible to gracefully degrade to support older versions of XD (and please test in an older XD version to confirm it works!). But if your plugin absolutely requires XD 18, don’t forget to set your manifest.json file to specify "minVersion": "18.0".

There’s also one enhancement added in XD 18 for plugin users:

  • Plugin listing displays new fields – The summary, languages, and website fields that were recently added to the manifest are now displayed in the Discover/Manage Plugins UI.

XD 18 is a relatively minor release from the standpoint of user features (lots coming in XD 19!) so there is no general release blog post to link to this month.

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https://www.adobe.com/in/products/xd/features.html
features not updated here no new updated features ?
@peterflynn

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There aren’t any major new user-facing features in XD 18 – it is mainly bug fixes and under-the-hood updates – so there’s nothing new to list on that “Features” page.

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It would be nice if we could tell XD where our plugin folder is, instead of have a dedicated XD directory.

I like to have all my repos in one projects directory.

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@mudlabs

You might want to have a look at xdpm. With it, you can run

xdpm watch

in a plugin directory and it just installs (i.e., copies it to the develop folder) the plugin for you (and reinstalls when you change something). You can equally also use xdpm install to install the plugin once and xdpm package to create the .xdx file.

This way, it is much easier to deal with plugins and at least I (and I think a lot of other, “more advanced”, if there’s such a thing, plugin developers do, too) find this to be a good practice as developing directly from your develop folder is – let’s say – kind of risky (there only needs to be a mistake during an update and your plugin is gone :neutral_face:).

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This is just what I needed thanks @pklaschka

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