Firefox plugin

[dwees]

Hi folks,

I'm working on a Firefox plugin to allow for editing of code (including code syntax highlighting) inside the Firefox (or now Netscape 9.0) browser.

I'm using WYMeditor because I'm familiar with jQuery, and I love the jQuery library.

Anyway, I've got the editor successfully embedded within the Firefox browser (you just click on a menu item and it opens in a new tab). There seems to be some issues with the paths to various files, which I am trying to sort out. None of the pop up buttons currently work because of path problems.

If anyone wants to help me out with that, I would appreciate it. The link to the code is below:

Download fireeditor.xpi

On my todo list:

1. Integrate the Chili (jQuery) code highlighting plugin.
2. Create a 'Save', 'Save as', 'Load', 'New' file menu for the editor.
3. Fix the bug(s) described above.
4. Create an official project on the Firefox extensions page.

Anything else anyone can suggest?

[jfh]

Great! Thanks for sharing it, dwees.

About the path problem, perhaps you should rename jquery-1.1.3.1.pack.js to jquery.js, as I don't see jQueryPath in the options.

Quoted from http://trac.wymeditor.org/trac/wiki/0.3/Integration

Note: WYMeditor automagically detects the paths of required CSS and JS files.
You'll need to initialize basePath, cssPath and jQueryPath if you don't use default file names (i.e. jquery.wymeditor.js, wymeditor/skins/{skin name}/screen.css, jquery.js).

I think it'd be convenient to add your plugin to the SVN, so you'll benefit from the versioning and the Trac systems.

Please feel free to drop a mail to the dev mailing-list to announce the plugin to the other developers.

Thanks!

[dwees]

Yeah, and I've love to find some help with some of the extras for this plugin. At the very least I should add a file open/save/close/new menu to the plugin, etc... to make it actually useful.

This is a total side project for me though so I don't know how regular I'll be making updates to it.

Dave

[jfh]

Yeah, and I've love to find some help with some of the extras for this plugin. At the very least I should add a file open/save/close/new menu to the plugin, etc... to make it actually useful.

Cool - I'd like to help but I'm not used to writing Firefox extensions...

This is a total side project for me though so I don't know how regular I'll be making updates to it.

OK. Could you please specify the copyright/license you want to distribute it under? Can I include it in the packages?

[dwees]

GPL/Mozilla Public License is fine with me. I don't intend to try and force people to buy this.

I think I've got just the Mozilla Public license on the files now, but GPL makes sense to me as well.

Dave

[jfh]

GPL/Mozilla Public License is fine with me. I don't intend to try and force people to buy this.

I think I've got just the Mozilla Public license on the files now, but GPL makes sense to me as well.

OK - I guess there aren't licensing issues if you choose MPL/GPL (WYMeditor is MIT/GPL).

Do you think it's possible to point the content/jquery and content/wymeditor directories to existing directories in the repo, so we avoid duplicates?

I mean something like:

wymeditor/trunk/src/apps/fireeditor/
wymeditor/trunk/src/apps/fireeditor/content/
wymeditor/trunk/src/apps/fireeditor/content/js/
wymeditor/trunk/src/apps/fireeditor/defaults/
wymeditor/trunk/src/apps/fireeditor/locale/
wymeditor/trunk/src/apps/fireeditor/skin/

with jquery and wymeditor available at
wymeditor/trunk/src/jquery/
wymeditor/trunk/src/wymeditor/

I guess the build scripts will need some customization.

[dwees]

The only issue I see with that is that when someone checks out FireEditor and attempts to install it as an add-on for Firefox (or Navigator 9 now too), the directory structure required for add-ons is quite a bit different. For add-ons, all of the files have to be in a subdirectory of the pluginname folder.

Not sure how to resolve that, because obviously having duplication of files is a problem as well (especially when we are using slightly different versions of jquery).

I don't anticipate jQuery becoming especially popular for Firefox add-ons so I doubt we'd be able to split this up easily.

Dave

[jfh]

The only issue I see with that is that when someone checks out FireEditor and attempts to install it as an add-on for Firefox (or Navigator 9 now too), the directory structure required for add-ons is quite a bit different. For add-ons, all of the files have to be in a subdirectory of the pluginname folder.

Actually I solved the problem by updating the Makefile.

I've uploaded fireeditor to svn://svn.wymeditor.org/trunk/src/apps/fireeditor

If someone checks out the trunk, he'll need to build Fire Editor by issuing:

Code: Select all

make fireeditor

I've modified fireeditor.html and wymeditor_init.js, mainly to correct the paths.

The XPI builds and installs OK, the editor works fine.

There's still a problem with the pop-ups, which don't load the JS.
I've made local tests and find out that replacing WYMeditor src by chrome://fireeditor/content/wymeditor/wymeditor/jquery.wymeditor.js in the dialogHtml option does the trick, but problems remain in WYM_INIT_DIALOG.
I guess it's related to the 'window' calls, but I'm no FF extension guru.
Any idea?

[dwees]

Well one of the src attributes of one of the script elements for each pop-up window has 'undefined' for its source. So I suppose we'd have to trace backwards to figure out where that variable is defined etc... I tried doing this but I'm not familiar enough with the structure of jquery.wymeditor.js to be effective at this type of debugging.

I started by trying to make some changes to jquery.wymeditor.js itself to see if I could figure out the error, but no such luck.

When I get a chance I'm going to focus on creating the file menu stuff next and hopefully inspiration will strike and one of us can solve the pop-up issue.

Dave