What features does the Obsidian Digital Garden plugin offer?

The Obsidian Digital Garden plugin is a free and open source publishing tool that lets you publish notes directly from Obsidian to the internet. Its main draw is that it is "feature packed" while staying highly configurable and hackable, and it lets you enable or disable features on a per-note basis. That combination makes it usable both as a full-fledged digital garden and as a simple note-sharing solution.

Core publishing capability

The plugin's central function is direct publishing: you write in Obsidian and push notes to the web without leaving the app. This is the feature that defines the tool — it turns your vault into a website rather than requiring a separate site-building workflow.

Configurability and hackability

The plugin is described as highly configurable and hackable. In practice this means:

• You can shape how the published site behaves rather than accepting one fixed output.
• Because it is open source, you can inspect and modify it if the default behavior does not fit your needs.
• Configuration is a first-class part of the tool, not an afterthought.

If you want a publish button with no decisions to make, this flexibility is more than you need. If you want control over how your garden looks and behaves, it is the point.

Per-note feature toggling

Features can be enabled and disabled on a per-note basis. This is the detail that separates the plugin from simpler "publish everything" tools: you decide note by note what gets which treatment, so a single vault can mix fully featured garden pages with plain shared notes.

Two ways to use it

The same feature set supports two distinct use cases:

You do not have to commit to one. The per-note controls let you start with simple sharing and expand toward a garden, or run both side by side.

Hosting: self-managed vs. one-click

The plugin itself is the publishing tool. If you would rather not handle the technical setup, Forestry.md is a separate cloud service for hosting your digital garden with a one-click setup. The plugin and the hosting service are distinct choices: the plugin covers publishing and configuration, while Forestry.md addresses hosting convenience.

Seeing it in practice

The project site itself runs on the Digital Garden plugin, so it doubles as a working example. For a broader, regularly updated list of gardens built by the community, the site points to the Obsidian Gallery maintained by GitHub user Jiri Sifalda. Named featured sites include Edav Garden, ajy.co, Teresa Watts, That Other Dev, Hermitage, IceWind.Quest, Craft Engineer, DigiGarden, and notes.ole.dev — useful if you want to see how others have configured the plugin before setting up your own.