We’ve invested our efforts and research to ensure that, straight out of the box, the ftrack platform is as powerful as it can possibly be.
And what does power mean for ftrack? A logical balance of intuitive design and deep functionality. ftrack offers this via its flexibility and the option to manipulate the toolset to suit specific user requirements. We do this via Actions, Widgets and our robust API – three solutions that see ftrack stand apart from the other production tracking tools available.
Actions
Actions provide a platform for users to tightly integrate processes such as generating reports, automating repetitive tasks, creating file system structures and much, much more. These Actions appear directly in the ftrack web interface, making them seamlessly accessible and easy to use. With any Action you can also customise parts of the ftrack UI and request additional information from the user before the Actions run (i.e. requesting an email address to send a report to). There’s a lot of depth there – Actions are totally open to your experimentation.
Widgets
Custom widgets are a great way to transform your ftrack experience. Widgets can be embedded in the dashboard and can be used to perform various Actions, including real-time notification display, events tracking, iframe content display and navigation hosting.
You can see a few examples below:

A basic example in vanilla JavaScript showing published versions.

An example showing how to use the c3js library for building chart widgets in ftrack. The example shows a line chart with number of created versions during the last 30 days.

An example showing how to use the templating engine library, Handlebars, for widgets in ftrack. The example shows review sessions for a project.

An example shows how the JavaScript API can be used in conjunction with ES2015, React and Webpack to build a widget showing notes.
Read more about the widget API and how to get started with custom widgets
You will also find links to all of the examples in the above link.
Deeper customisation
With ftrack’s newly introduced API client for JavaScript, you can build rich user interfaces that utilize ftrack’s open API to fetch and update relevant data directly from the browser.
Over the coming months, we will create reusable UI components that you can implement into the UI to build custom widgets, providing a seamless user experience.
Let us know in our forum if you have any feedback or need any help building dashboard widgets. ftrack is a collaborative tool by nature – you can impact on its development!
Any of these new reusable UI components available yet?
Hi Ian,
We are still working on moving components over to a shared repository, which can be found at: https://bitbucket.org/ftrack/ftrack-spark-components. It is still mostly empty, but will continue to add new components over time.
We have also created a base project, ftrack-spark-base, which can be used as a starting point for creating widgets using these components. See this project at https://bitbucket.org/ftrack/ftrack-spark-base.
Regards,
Lucas