An Introduction to Obsidian: Community Plugins

What are Community Plugins?

As with Core plugins, community plugins take advantage of the open architecture of Obsidian. They add new features and capabilities with the only difference from Core plugins in that they aren’t included with the Obsidian app and have to be installed first before activating and using them. The other main difference is they are built by the community. Anyone can create an Obsidian app, so this is where they can be placed for everyone to use and take advantage of.

Safe Mode and Settings

To use Community apps, you go to the Settings (gear icon) and select the Community plugin tab below the Core plugin tab. The first option in the menu is Safe mode. To use Community plugins, you must ensure this is switched off. If you are concerned about absolute security for a particular vault, then by having Safe mode switched on, nothing else will run in Obsidian unless it’s a Core plugin developed by Obsidian developers themselves.

From this menu, you can select Browse to search through the community plugins’ directory. An excellent place to start is to make sure the order of plugins displayed (sort symbol) is by download count. This will give you the plugins in order of popularity which is a good indicator of the plugin’s usefulness.

Example Plugins

Some examples of useful plugins, which also demonstrate the variety of things possible, include Calendar, mindmap, advanced tables, data view and Kanban plugins. One I use is an official plugin by Readwise to enable syncing with my Readwise highlights.

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