Firefox/Firebug extension creator wizard
Always wanted to create a Firefox extension? Or a Firebug extension? Here's an easy way to take off the ground, no more excuses.
Firefox Extensions
The way most people get started with creating a Firefox extension is copying an existing extension and tweaking. This is not the best way as you can guess, the best way is to read documentation (where exists), but who cares about reading documentation. It's a fact that there are specific predefined files, directories and conventions you need to follow in order to get started with even the simplest "Hello World". Well, with my new tool, this is taken care of, so you can literally turn any piece of JavaScript (a bookmarklet for example) into a browser extension. Not bad, eh?
The tool
The tool is located at http://tools.w3clubs.com/ext/
It's basically just a simple form you fill out with your name, URL, extension name, etc, then a working extension is generated for you. You then install your own extension and just start modifying it. So your new extension is ready in under a minute.
Firebug extensions
I did this tool a while ago for personal needs and it has been working for me with no worries. Today before making it public, I thought of adding the option to generate Firebug extensions too. You knew Firebug is extensible and you can add new tabs, right? Yahoo!'s YSlow is an example of a Firebug extension.
I followed Honza's Firebug tutorials part I and II and it worked beautifully. Honza is a Firebug contributor and these tutorials are excellently written and highly recommended, even if you use my tool to generate the code, it's still a good idea to know why things are what/where they are.
So there you go, same tool for creating both Firefox and Firebug extensions.
Have fun with the tool, but be aware that writing extensions is addictive, don't say I didn't warn you. As always, any feedback is appreciated.
April 26th, 2008 at 8:30 am
Oh yes, you can easily get addicted
i’m not programming clasic firefox extensions, but simple extensions for Grease Monkey, wich you can simply write in JavaScript. The only problem is that they are in the range of document, so you can’t actualy add some button to firefox, but you can change web page content. This can be very useful for page mods, for example I moded Travian game with this
sorry for my bad english, I am Slovenian and I can’t speak english very well
April 28th, 2008 at 8:12 am
Cool service! I am already dependant
Honza
August 9th, 2008 at 3:35 am
Hey, that doesn’t work in FF3 !
August 9th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Oops, my bad - it works. However, it has a bug: if I type letters Č Ž Š or č ž š (slovenian letters) in author name it doesn’t work.
August 9th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Thanks Bostjan, I’ll look into this, I guess I have to convert the special chars to entities.