Claude's default plugin guidance tells you the mechanics, not how to design a plugin that extends well — this marketplace offers the concept/realization pattern so a plugin realizes cleanly into real-world variation.
Anthropic's plugin/marketplace standard defines the mechanics — manifest schema, directory layout, component types — but says nothing about how to structure a marketplace repo well as you build it: what naming to use, what docs are expected, how to shape a plugin whose capability has more than one possible implementation. Without that layer, every marketplace author either reinvents these conventions from scratch or drifts into inconsistency one plugin at a time, and a mistake surfaces only as a confusing failure downstream, far from the change that caused it.
This marketplace is that missing layer. Install these plugins into your
marketplace repo and they'll guide you toward good structure as you
write it, and give you a clear, specific notice when something's off —
instead of leaving you to remember the rules yourself. It is not a
general-purpose plugin collection, and it's not meant to be installed
into an ordinary application workspace — it's for the person building
the marketplace repo itself (a .claude-plugin/marketplace.json plus a
plugins/ directory), authored so its checks run as you write, not
after.
Neither plugin here is more foundational than the other — install both. guidance-conventions enforces the structure your marketplace repo should have; guidance-activation-check is the runtime helper any plugin built with that structure can call on to fail predictably instead of confusingly.
-
guidance-conventions — checks your marketplace repo's naming, required docs, and structure as you author it, including a deeper check for any plugin that adopts the concept/realization pattern described below. This is where the marketplace-authoring rules live.
-
guidance-activation-check — a shared pre-flight check your plugins can call before doing real work. It validates
marketplace-plugin-settings.ymlagainst the active realization's published config schema, so a missing or outdated configuration produces one clear, actionable message instead of a confusing failure deep in unrelated logic.
Run these from inside your marketplace project:
/plugin marketplace add DeepElement/claude-plugin-guidance-framework
/plugin install guidance-conventions@claude-plugin-guidance
/plugin install guidance-activation-check@claude-plugin-guidance
If a plugin you're building represents a capability with more than one possible implementation (e.g. secrets, notifications — something with swappable providers), this marketplace recommends a specific pattern for it: an abstract concept, a contract concrete providers must satisfy, one or more provider realizations, and a single settings file where a consumer picks and configures a provider.
Read How this marketplace works for the full explanation and the detailed spec — this README stays intentionally short.
This repo doesn't redefine the Claude Code plugin/marketplace standard itself (directory layout, manifest schema, component types) — that's owned by Anthropic and documented at:
See CONTRIBUTING.md for the PR workflow and the conventions your plugin needs to follow.
Apache 2.0, with an added requirement: any public use of this project ("claude-plugin-guidance") or a derivative must visibly credit "DeepElement" and link back to its source repository, DeepElement/claude-plugin-guidance-framework. See LICENSE for the exact terms.
This project's use of Claude and other pay-for-use models was supported by a donation from joelunger.com.