feat(ui-commands): allow plugins to open a core panel or a specific sidekick panel

[AtilaU19]

What does this PR do?

Adds pluginApi.uiCommands.sidekickArea.panel, so a plugin can drive the sidekick area from a button of its own:

// the plugin's own sidekick, by the id setGenericContentItems returned
pluginApi.uiCommands.sidekickArea.panel.open('my-content-id');

// a core panel
pluginApi.uiCommands.sidekickArea.panel.open(undefined, SidekickAreaCorePanelEnum.POLL);

// close it again, or close whatever is on display
pluginApi.uiCommands.sidekickArea.panel.close('my-content-id');
pluginApi.uiCommands.sidekickArea.panel.close();

open and close take the target as two arguments rather than one union, so the position tells a generic content id apart from a core panel — a plugin may pick its own id, and 'poll' would otherwise be ambiguous.

The newly exported SidekickAreaCorePanelEnum covers Chat, User list, Shared notes, Apps gallery, Polls, Timer and Breakout rooms. The client only honours a panel the user could have reached themselves: Polls, Timer and Breakout are ignored unless they are registered for that user, whose registration already accounts for role and feature flag.

The commands ship with their own window events, OPEN_SIDEKICK_AREA_PANEL_COMMAND and
CLOSE_SIDEKICK_AREA_PANEL_COMMAND. The diff is purely additive: the deprecated sidekickArea.options.panel and sidekickOptionsContainer are untouched, so plugins built against an older SDK are unaffected.

sidekickArea.options.panel.open also gained the optional id of a generic content sidekick area, so a plugin can open its own sidekick panel the same way.

More

Screencast.from.04-08-2026.14.13.27.webm

[Arthurk12]

The sidekick options container is analogous to the sidebar navigation, so its open and close methods are expected to open and close the sidebar navigation itself. With that in mind, I have 2 suggestions:

1. Remove those methods (pluginApi.uiCommands.sidekickArea.options.open/close), as BBB 4.0 does not allow toggling the sidebar navigation — and calling them already has no effect, since they are bypassed in the BBB core:
   https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/blob/13c457fc6f47a651a2ecb19155a87ab7bc609dd2/bigbluebutton-html5/imports/ui/components/plugins-engine/ui-commands/sidekick-options-container/handler.tsx#L8-L18
   (This can be addressed in a separate PR.)
2. Move the new methods implemented here to src/ui-commands/sidekick-area/panel/commands.ts, so the caller code would be:

pluginApi.uiCommands.sidekickArea.panel.open('my-content-id')

[Arthurk12]

Any thoughts on this approach, @GuiLeme?

[GuiLeme]

Agreed on both suggestions. Having a the commands under sidekick.panel is the right approach:

pluginApi.uiCommands.sidekickArea.panel.open('my-content-id');
pluginApi.uiCommands.sidekickArea.panel.close('my-content-id')

[Arthurk12]

Superseded by #286