When creating a GUI or an Alchemy Extension, you may end up with a Ribbon tool icon that appears outside of the main ribbon.  This area doesn’t automatically use the 16 x 16 icon, so here’s what you need to do to ensure you’ve covered this one off.
I’m in the process of creating my first Alchemy Extension that uses custom configuration settings and I thought I’d share some learning as I go as I think it’s safe to say a good chunk of all extensions will use some sort of custom configuration.
Anyone building a plugin for Alchemy4Tridion is familiar with the repeated steps of:  Building the project, alt-tabbing to the CME Alchemy page, uninstalling the plugin, alt tabbing to your build directory, moving your hand to the mouse, dragging the *.a4t to the plugin window, yaawwwwnnn, ctrl-tabbing to the CME Content Explorer, F5ing the content. After the billionth time of doing this you yearn for something quicker!
This is John’s car. Seemed relevant.
I’ll let the video do most of the talking (yeah, I did a video walkthrough of the basic functionality), but the basic premise is this: on a whim (and a challenge from John), I set about creating an Alchemy plugin from scratch. Prior to this my experience with UI extensions was minimal, but Alex and John have been hooting for weeks that developing an Alchemy plugin is about a thousand times easier than creating one from scratch. So I accepted, and wrote a theme manager that allows for previewing, installing, and all sorts of other shenanigans… and a (mostly) complete theme… in less than a week.
So I wanted to make a really simple Alchemy plugin to test out the amazing new SDL Web plugin store that my colleagues have been working on this year.  It’s a simple plugin where I inject a little bit of javascript into the publish dialog to permanently check the ‘Abort Publishing’ check-box button, but it’s a great learning experiment plus its a nice example if you’re looking to write a plugin that simply adds a bit of javascript or css etc.