Skip to main content

Recipe form fields best practices

Tips to get your plugin published with great UX and functionality.

Ryan avatar
Written by Ryan
Updated over 3 weeks ago

Thousands of private plugins have been created by TRMNL users, and 100s have been submitted to the public Recipes directory:

Until May 2025 we manually reviewed each detail of every submission, from the markup to custom form fields, spelling and grammar, and general usability.

Then we created Chef (demo), a Recipe linting utility. See tips below to make a Recipe that pleases him.

Custom field has a link that can be optimized for usability

Instead of pointing users to external locations like this:

Live a little. Use HTML like so:

- keyname: api_key
name: API Key
description: Get your API key from <a href="https://somewhere.com/settings" class="underline" target="_blank">Server Settings</a>.
placeholder: asdf-fdsa
field_type: string
optional: true

Which produces:

Embedded links make description text shorter, open up in a new tab, and are more obviously clickable with the underline CSS class applied.

Did this answer your question?