Firefox Extension Idea

TheBaker

Hey there people, I'm a fairly new Vanilla user with just a weeks experience of it behind me. I've got an extension idea though that I'd like to develop but I'd need some help doing so and I was wondering whether anyone would be up for helping me out. Basically I was thinking of creating a Firefox extension (possibly a toolbar) that would integrate with Vanilla. I've written some Firefox extensions (anyone heard of Smiley Xtra? That was one of mine) before, so I can handle that bit. The extension system of Vanilla is all a bit confusing to me though, and its that bit I need help with. Is there anyone who'd be up for collaborating with me on it? Me doing the extension and them doing the server-side stuff? I've done a fair amount of PHP before, so I can help out a bit on that side of things (and probably more as I begin to get familiar with how the Vanilla extension system works). The kind of stuff I was thinking of putting on the extension is normal stuff like the search and new discussions, but maybe also some unique features that currently aren't in the Vanilla interface (that would require some thought and discussion though). So anyone interested?

Minisweeper

Certainly sounds like an interesting idea, i'm afraid i dont have the necessary skills though. Mark himself may even be interested if he can think outside core development at the moment.. *shrug

lech

I honestly can't think of anything that could really warrant the need for a firefox extension to be used with vanilla. But feel free to try something out, I haven't contemplated all the possibilities but the only thing I can think of is maybe a counter to see how many new threads await you.

TheBaker

I've had a thought about possible features it could have, and came up with a few: * Discussion Watch - Alerts you when someone posts a new thread/comment * Whisper Watch - Alerts you when you have new whispers (seperate from Discussion Watch so you can enable/disable them seperately) * Quick access to certain features * User-Friendly search - Makes the search feature available from the Firefox toolbar, and makes it easier to use (so you don't have to remember the roles: or sort: stuff - especially useful for new users) * Access to the Vanilla Clipboard from any site, so you can copy and paste stuff anywhere * Set common options from the toolbar, such as hiding panels, so you don't have to preferences each time you want to change stuff And of course anything else people can think of.

lech

For most of these, you might seriously be better off just creating extensions for vanilla itself, rather than make a semi-proprietary extension straight for firefox. Otherwise we're going to end up making extension for extensions and it's just going to boil down to siliness. However, to accomplish at least half of what you wish to do to simplify things, you could make some kind of specialized for-vanilla extension to poll the DB against a user (provided they've been authorized) and return an indexed xml file for all your outside services to utilize. This way, it's not only for mozilla but for anything else that can get access to it. Regardless, you would probably need something like this if you were going to do the FF extension anyway probably. I hope that made sense :) happy hacking :)

Mark

I'd be interested to see what you can come up with. If you need help doing something in vanilla, just post on here and ask how it can be done. I'm sure someone (if not me) will lend a hand.