Craft CMS 5 — Extending (Plugins & Modules)

Reference for extending Craft CMS 5 through plugins and modules. Covers everything from elements and services to controllers, migrations, fields, and events.

This skill is scoped to extending Craft — building plugins, modules, custom element types, field types, and backend integrations. For site/platform development (content modeling, sections, entry types, Twig templating, plugin selection), see the craft-site skill.

Companion Skills — Always Load Together

When this skill triggers, also load:

• craft-php-guidelines — PHPDoc standards, section headers, naming conventions, class organization, ECS/PHPStan, verification checklist. Required for any PHP code.
• ddev — All commands run through DDEV. Required for running ECS, PHPStan, scaffolding, and tests.
• craft-garnish — When working on CP JavaScript, asset bundles, or interactive CP components. Covers Garnish's class system, UI widgets (Modal, HUD, DisclosureMenu, Select), drag system, and the Craft.* JS class pattern.
• craft-pest — When writing, running, fixing, or reviewing tests. Covers the markhuot/craft-pest-core harness, database isolation (its rollback is opt-in and its env overrides are cwd-bound — both cause silent writes to the dev database), factories, HTTP/queue/DB assertions, and CI test jobs.
• craft-cloud — When the project is hosted on Craft Cloud (detect via craft-cloud.yaml at the repo root or craftcms/cloud in composer.json). Required for plugin Cloud-compatibility constraints — App::isEphemeral() guards, asset-bundle CDN publishing, 15-minute queue-job cap, csrfInput() function over raw token output, and the cloud/up deploy lifecycle events.

Documentation