The guys over at Mozilla Update are doing some great work, but the lack of a facility to manage (upload, change descriptions, …) has really been stalling it from moving to the next level and making it “the place to go” for extensions and themes. Updates were slow, versions were stale. This has changed. The Developer Control Panel is now live.
Here’s a couple of things I’ve found out so far:
- Editing of project descriptions is broken (bug 290633)
- An XPI will not be accepted without an install.rdf file (bug 290683). This is fine for Firefox and Thunderbird extensions where install.rdf is mandatory. But Mozilla Suite add-ons use install.js. There is more information here on the GUIDs for all target applications. Here’s what a sample install.rdf snippet would look like for a Mozilla Suite extension:
<em :targetApplication>
<description>
<em :id>{86c18b42-e466-45a9-ae7a-9b95ba6f5640}</em>
<em :minVersion>1.7</em>
<em :maxVersion>1.8</em>
</description>
</em:targetApplication>
More on this story over at Mozillazine.
Doesn’t that install.rdf need the [RDF][/RDF] and other surrounding xml ?
The bits that would definitely be left out are those concerned with overlays, since seamonkey’s not going to read them.
[a.]u.m.o would probably read the name, description, authors etc ?
Yes Chris, that was only a snippet, not a full install.rdf.
Mozilla Update reads the name, author(s), target applications and homepage.
Mozilla Update Developer Control Panel is now live
Brian King reports that the Mozilla Update Developer Control Panel is now live. This means that now developers can manage their own entries for their extensions. There are a few minor problems with it, but this is definitely a step in the right directi…