Overview of capabilities

What can apps do?

Apps are custom logic and capabilities developed to extend Atlassian products beyond their built-in capabilities. Apps define their extensions in a manifest file that gets registered by Atlassian upon install so that when a product executes capabilities that use those extensions it also knows which apps to interact with.

Some common examples of this include:

• Custom menu sections and items
• Custom panels within certain pages
• Macros that create custom interactions in content
• Webhooks that get called when certain product events occur
• Custom properties to extend product search capabilities

For more information, see About Confluence Cloud.

Cloud Development Options

There are a few ways you can extend and/or integrate with Confluence Cloud; including Atlassian's app development platforms, Forge & Connect, in addition to standalone applications. For more details about these options, see Cloud Development Options.

For more information about Forge and Connect, their concepts & modules, and how to get started see the resources below:

Forge

• Getting started with Forge
• Forge concepts
• Forge modules

Connect

• Getting started with Connect
• Connect concepts
• Connect patterns
• Connect modules

Capabilities

Across the various cloud development options, there are many capabilities available; though each option varies in its support. The Connect platform has been in use longer than Forge and currently has more capabilities, though typically with added complexity. Forge has been built for Cloud and its capabilities are well-abstracted. This overview focuses on these two frameworks.