WEBVTT - Eight plugins, one session, zero npm installs

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I shipped eight EmDash plugins in one session.

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Not prototypes.

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Not stubs.

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Working, tested, event-driven plugins with admin settings, dashboard widgets, storage, and API routes.

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Every one of them runs in production on this blog right now.

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This post is what I learned about building fast when the framework handles infrastructure and you only have to think about behavior.

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The plugin architecture that makes this possible

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EmDash's definePlugin() gives you five primitives:

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Storage — per-plugin document collections with indexes. Not key-value — full queryable collections with cursor pagination.

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KV — simple key-value for settings and state. Persists across deploys.

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Hooks — lifecycle events like content:afterSave, plugin:install, cron. Your code runs in response to things happening, not on a schedule you manage.

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Routes — plugin-scoped API endpoints. The framework handles auth, CORS, and request parsing.

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Admin UI — settings schemas, dashboard widgets, and admin pages. You declare the schema; EmDash renders the UI.

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The key insight: none of these require you to think about databases, authentication, deployment, or infrastructure. You write behavior. The framework provides everything else.

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What I built

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1. Agent Analytics

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Classifies every request by user-agent against 15 known AI crawler patterns. Records per-hit and daily aggregates in plugin storage. Dashboard widget shows agent vs human traffic percentage.

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The core is one pure function — classifyUserAgent(ua) — that returns { isAgent, name, operator }. Everything else is wiring.

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2. Tip Jar

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An x402 tip button on every post.

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Visitors send $0.

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25 USDC with one click.

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The payment settles on Base mainnet to my hardware wallet.

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The plugin records tips in storage and shows total revenue on the dashboard.

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The entire payment flow is EmDash's native x402.enforce() — I didn't write any payment code.

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3. MiniMax TTS Narration (Event-Driven)

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When a post is published, the content:afterSave hook checks if narration exists.

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If not, it generates audio via MiniMax's speech-2.

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8-hd model, uploads to R2, and records the narration in plugin storage.

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If quota is exhausted, it marks the item as quota-blocked with a 5-hour retry window and a cron handler processes the queue later.

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The narration is auto-discovered by the AudioPlayer component on the client — no manual wiring per post.

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4. MiniMax Hero Image (Event-Driven)

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Same pattern as TTS: content:afterSave fires on publish, checks if a hero image exists, generates one via MiniMax image-01 with configurable style presets (editorial-minimal, tech-dark, hand-drawn, photo-reportage, abstract-geometric).

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Five style presets, each expanding to a paragraph-level prompt with composition directives. The output is a 16:9 JPEG that goes straight to R2.

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5. Agent SEO

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Generates /robots.

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txt with explicit allow rules for 16 AI crawlers, /llms.

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txt per the llmstxt.

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org spec, and Organization JSON-LD.

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The bot catalog is versioned data — adding a new crawler is one line in a TypeScript array.

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6. PostHog Analytics

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Snippet builder with admin-path auto-exclusion and Do Not Track respect. The snippet only fires on public pages; the admin panel never gets tracked.

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7. Related Posts

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Pure-functional tag-overlap algorithm. Takes a post's tags and all posts' tags, returns the top N related posts ranked by shared tag count. The plugin stores the graph; the template renders the component.

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8. Forms (EmDash First-Party)

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The one I didn't build — EmDash ships it. Contact forms, submissions, Turnstile spam protection, email notifications.

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What makes this fast

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Three things made it possible to ship eight plugins in one session:

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No boilerplate. definePlugin() handles registration, storage provisioning, settings persistence, admin UI rendering, and route mounting. The smallest useful plugin is about 20 lines.

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Pure functional cores.

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Every plugin has a pure function at its center — classifyUserAgent(), buildRobotsTxt(), findRelatedPosts(), buildPostImagePrompt(), portableTextToNarration().

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These are trivial to test (64 unit tests, all passing in under a second) and trivial to reuse outside the plugin context.

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Event-driven by default.

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The content:afterSave hook means I never had to build admin buttons, cron schedules, or manual trigger endpoints for the common case.

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Publish a post and things happen.

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Quota runs out and things retry later.

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The plugins are autonomous.

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The numbers

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8 plugins, all running in production

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64 unit tests, 0 failures

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7 bridge routes for MiniMax API (image, TTS, music, video, video-status, video-download, voices)

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5 MiniMax-generated hero images

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1 ambient music track (music-2.5)

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1 cinematic hero video (Hailuo-2.3)

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1 AI narration with auto-discovery AudioPlayer

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All plugins MIT licensed, structured for npm extraction

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Zero npm packages published (yet)

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What's next

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Every plugin extracts cleanly as a standalone npm package.

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The plan is to publish them individually, write a companion blog post for each, and sell the skills that teach people how to build their own.

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The blog is the storefront; the plugins are the product; x402 is the revenue layer.

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If you're building on EmDash and want to see how any of these work, the source is at github.com/integrate-your-mind/mondello-dev. Pull requests welcome.