Meratyn

Manual/Guides

Plugins & Marketplace

Much of Meratyn’s functionality ships as plugins. The Plugins menu activates built-in plugins, and the Manage Plugins dialog (under Settings) installs, updates, and removes external plugins from a curated registry.

The Plugins menu

The Plugins menu lists the activatable plugins exposed by the current UI profile. Click a plugin to toggle it on or off; a check mark shows which are active. Integrations owned by Controls or Add Data appear on those surfaces instead of being duplicated here. Available entries include GeoEditor, Time Slider, Layer Swipe, Street View, USGS LiDAR, Overture Maps, GeoAgent, Historical Imagery, SamGeo, the STAC Catalogs, Vantor Open Data, Planet Open Data, ArcGIS Hub, Socrata, CKAN, and Natural Earth browsers, plus grouped Web Services and DGGS menus. The DGGS submenu contains H3 Grid, S2 Grid, A5 Grid, DGGRID, DGGAL, OLC, Geohash, and Tilecode; their generators, binning, and hierarchy operations live under Processing → DGGS. STAC Catalogs is also available through Add Data. Socrata and CKAN query their bounded public catalogs; Planet Open Data opens its public disaster STAC catalog; Natural Earth opens the curated Source Cooperative product; ArcGIS Hub searches the current map area when requested and pages public Feature Service, GeoJSON, CSV, Shapefile, KML, and File Geodatabase datasets. It adds supported Feature Service and GeoJSON items, opens public downloads for the six searched types, and can export the first Feature Service layer as bounded GeoJSON. See Data Integrations.

Planet Open Data is pre-connected to a public disaster STAC catalog. Activate it from Plugins → Web Services to search collections and items without entering a catalog URL; supported assets can be added as normal project layers. It shares the STAC browser runtime with STAC Catalogs, so activating one deactivates the other. The previous browser is restored when switching back, and a saved project keeps the last selected browser when both IDs are present.

For plugins that add an on-map control, a submenu lets you position the control in any corner: top left, top right, bottom left, or bottom right.

Manage Plugins

Open Settings → Manage Plugins to browse the marketplace. The dialog is modeled on QGIS, with sections for All, Installed, Not installed, Upgradeable, and Settings.

  • Search the registry and Install an entry with one click. Installation records the plugin’s manifest URL and registers it immediately, with no restart.
  • Update appears when a newer version is published; it re-fetches and re-registers the plugin in place, keeping the old version if the update fails.
  • Uninstall (after a confirmation) unregisters the plugin at runtime and tears down any active control.
  • The Settings section manages additional plugin sources: extra local directories and manual manifest URLs.

Compatibility is checked against each entry’s minMappViewVersion, so incompatible plugins are flagged rather than installed.

Trust model Plugins run as trusted code, so the marketplace registry is curated, plugins load over HTTPS, and every marketplace or project-supplied install asks for your explicit consent before it runs.

Where plugins come from

  • Curated registry: the marketplace lists plugins reviewed and published by Meratyn.
  • Manifest URL: point the Settings section at any plugin.json manifest URL.
  • Local directory: load a plugin from a local folder (desktop app).

Writing your own plugin

To write your own plugin, start with Writing Plugins — a guided walkthrough of the lifecycle, state, and UI patterns behind complex plugins, with a pre-flight checklist. The Reference → Plugin API then lists every TypeScript interface, the plugin.json manifest contract, and the built-in plugins.