Recently I’ve been spending all my spare time working on a plugin for the Alchemy Webstore. My plugin needs a popup page to display some information and controls, so I’ve added a simple aspx page, along with a css and js file to give it a little bit of pizazz. Unfortunately for me, I have a very iterative approach to front end development, constantly tweaking my html and css as I get my page looking how I picture it, which with Alchemy means rebuilding my plugin and reinstalling it over and over again. Or does it?

Turns out that Alchemy stores all of its asset files under:

• %tridion_home%\web\Alchemy\Plugins\%Your_Plugin%\assets.

In here you can access all of your static pages, images, css and js, meaning you can update these and see your changes on the fly. If you run into any caching issues in seeing your changes, one option to resolve this is to increment your System.config’s modification number by 1. This file is found at:

• %tridion_home%\WebUI\WebRoot\Configuration\System.config

The important thing when doing this is to make sure you copy all of your changes back into your plugin project before uninstalling your plugin to reinstall a later version, or else you’ll lose all your changes!