Got a question to the implementation of plugins. Which plugins within the Linchpin Suite can be loaded and configured without being visible to the end-user?
A plugin installed to Confluence mostly provides a set of macros, which can be placed into a page. Those macros are usually public to every user and can be found via the macro browser to be placed into a page. Some macros of the Linchpin Suite rely on a basic configuration done via the Confluence administration interface (e.g. topics for the microblog, profile fields for filtering content).
If we load the plugins to our production environment and do anything within the ‘Configure’ option of the plugin will they be visible to the end-user other than the macros showing up in the Macro Browser. My assumption is that the Menu Navigation will show once we perform any configuration of the plugin. Is that correct?
It depends on the plugin what will be visible to the end-user after you install or configure the plugin. Mostly a macro of the plugin must be placed into a page (or another area of the UI) at first to take the plugin into action for the end-user, but that’s not always the case. For the Navigation Menu plugin, in particular, you have to publish a configured menu version before it is displayed to everyone. Before that, you can configure and preview the menu just for yourself. Another way is to prevent the menu bar being displayed in the header automatically by disabling the option display navigation in header in the configuration of the Menu Editor (another way is to remove the menu macro invocation in the theme/template if you use this method). In general, for every plugin there may be ways to prevent the plugin/macro being visible to the end-user, so you can configure it properly at first. Like for the Navigation Menu plugin, we have to look into every plugin how to achieve that.
I hope this is answering your question. If not, give me another try!