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tombogle edited this page Mar 19, 2025 · 11 revisions

Extensions of Platform Bible

This documentation is for extensions of Platform.Bible and Paratext Studio.

For more general information, user guides, and developer guides, see the Paranext wiki.

Why extensions?

An extensible Bible translation editing platform allows translation teams to choose from a variety of extensions to work with their project. Some extensions will offer familiar features from Paratext, such as Text Collection and Biblical Terms. However, the open-source nature of Platform.Bible, combined with community involvement, enables organizations and even individual users to develop their own extensions to meet specific needs.

While many extensions will focus on Bible translation, they can also support a wide range of related tasks, including dictionary creation, community checking, and publishing.

Getting Started

Building extensions for Platform.Bible may seem like a daunting task at first. To introduce the basic process and guide you through the steps to develop your first extension, we suggest you go through the exercise of creating a "Hello World" extension.

Once you have been through this exercise, you can follow steps 2-4 in Your First Extension Prerequisites again and then refer to the generalized instructions in the README to begin devloping your own extension. (Or, if you prefer, you can just begin modifying your "Hello World" extension to turn it into the real extension you want to create.)

Benefit of using templates

This template — as well as the paranext-multi-extension-template — is actively maintained to reflect ongoing changes in Platform.Bible. Not only can you use it as a starting point for your extensions, which you can configure freely, but you can also merge future updates from the template into your extensions.

Additional Resources

As you develop your extension, you will probably frequently refer to the Platform API Documentation to see React components and utilities available to use in your extentions and to better understand the capabilities of extensions.

When running Platform.Bible, on the main menu, click Open Developer Documentation to open a live page in your browser with a live, real-time, RPC playground containing information about all the commands available.

Additionally, this recorded presentation from the Paratext Summit in September 2023 provides an overview of building extensions. (Note that some details will change as development progresses.)

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