Video Transcript

Alright, now that we've mastered the core plugins, let's go to the next level with community plugins. This is one of the things I love about Obsidian. The Obsidian developers made the application with a plugin architecture. That's why those original features made by the developers are called core plugins because they're using the plugin architecture that they made available to the community. So community plugins are plugins made by other people.

There is a security concern, are you going to use a plugin made by someone you don't know in the application? Well they've tried to solve that problem by having this community plugin database where it shows you the number of people downloading it and they have some ways to try and make sure that you're safe with these plugins. But the ones I'm going to be covering in this section are very well respected and downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.

But once you start adding these community plugins you're going to see how you can really customize the Obsidian experience. If you want to make it your task manager, there's a plugin for that. If you want to make it a better database management application, there's a plugin for that. No matter what it is you're looking to do with Obsidian, somebody's made a plugin. In this section, I'm going to teach you how to install a plugin, and then we're going to go through some of my favorite plugins so you can get an idea of just how far you can take Obsidian with these community plugins.

To install a community plugin, you want to go to the Obsidian settings and then go over to this Community Plugins tab. By default, it's going to be turned off. They've got a bunch of language here about security and explanations of what you're getting because a community plugin is something made by someone in the community. It's not made by the developer and they can't ensure that it hasn't got any sort of malicious code in it. That being said, I am only recommending some of the most popular plugins that are well reviewed and understood to be good players in the community. But to get it started, you turn on community plugins and that gets you to this additional setting to say that we're going to turn on this mode.

Now if you want to leave it, you can click turn on restricted mode which disables community plugins and then they've got a way to browse the existing plugins and it shows you your current plugins. I don't have any installed. This is a clean install for the video. I'm going to go go ahead and browse and you can see here is a lot of community plugins. Some of these are going to be covered in this field guide. In fact, many of the most popular ones are covered here. In the very first video we're going to talk about calendar plugin but you can see here's Excalidraw that's got 811,000 downloads and was updated four days ago. So these plugins are very well recognized and very frequently downloaded and vetted.

Now as you scroll through that you can see there's currently 978. You get towards the bottom here you've got some that are only downloaded you know a thousand times or even less. Let's go to the very bottom we've got one here that collapses Windows it's only been downloaded 27 times. I think you should look at those with a little bit of a raised eyebrow. Check out the developer make sure you know what you're getting into.

In this course I'm not going to be covering all 978 plugins but instead some of the more popular ones that I have come to rely on and just look at this as a real fun thing for you as you get into Obsidian you can examine and explore some of these additional plugins and add additional features to the Obsidian application through these plugins it's kind of awesome. So I'm gonna get started with Calendar in the next video but several more of these are going to get covered in this section.