The Leaflet JS mapping library has lots of plugins available. The Leaflet package for R provides direct support for some, but far from all, of these plugins, by providing R functions for invoking the plugins.
If you as an R user find yourself wanting to use a Leaflet plugin that isn't directly supported in the R package, you can use the technique shown here to load the plugin yourself and invoke it using JS code.
Like everyone else, I'm also having problems adapting the example. My question is this: what's the best way to debug problems? All I know is that it's not working for me, but no error messages are reported. I tried opening the map in the browser and inspecting but nothing appears on the console. Suggestions?