Mozdev.org

Come support mozdev at OSCON 2008. We want to hear your ideas and meet fellow mozilla folks. Our schedule:

Wednesday 7/23
7:30pm
Location: D137
BOF Tools and Other Resources for Mozilla Extension Development
http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/detail/4645

Thursday 7/24
10:45am
Location : Portland 252
State of Lightning Talks
http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/detail/2236

Hope to see you there!

Well, if the Songbird folks can do it, so can we!

Mozdev will be at OSCON this year from Weds 23 to Fri 26 July. Representing are David Boswell, Doug Warner, Eric Jung, Myk Melez, Nigel Howard, and Brian King. We are partly sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation, and would like to express great appreciation for that.

What will we be doing there?
- Leading a BOF session on extension development, at 19:30 on Wednesday, the 23rd.
- Giving a "State Of" Lightning talk with other non-profit organisations.
- Having a Mozdev board meeting, the first ever in person.
- Volunteering at the Mozilla booth.

We hope to see current Mozdev project owners and site users there, but also would like to get new people on board. The Mozdev mission fits nicely into the OSCON ethos, and meeting people from other communities will be beneficial.

At mozdev.org we are currently hosting extensions, themes and other add-ons for over 15 different Mozilla-based applications. We are interested in working together with the organizations making these applications to help us with our mission of establishing Mozilla as a viable development platform, helping proliferate Mozilla technologies and increasing the user base of Mozilla-based applications.

We would like to give organizations that are using Mozilla technologies an opportunity to sponsor extensions for their applications that are hosted on mozdev and to find ways to work together to grow their extension developer communities. A few ideas we've had about possible ways to integrate the mozdev community with an application's add-on developer community include:

• Promoting an application's extensions on the mozdev.org home page
• Creating a branded and customized extensions portal (see the just launched Songbird portal for an example of what's possible)
• Subscribing team members to a sponsors group where they can talk to other people working on Mozilla-based applications

Every organization will have their own unique needs, so we are open to any other ideas about how we can help grow the extension developer community around a particular Mozilla-based application. If sponsoring extensions on mozdev is something you'd like to talk more about, please feel free to post here or contact us.

Many people who host the development of their extension on mozdev also distribute their work on addons.mozilla.org and not surprisingly we've received a number of requests to make managing projects in both locations easier for developers.

From these requests and from other discussions with project owners, we've known that more integration would help some developers but we haven't had any specific information about how many people would benefit. Well, today I had the idea that I should just go and look at how many add-ons on AMO have mozdev listed as their developer home page. The results for the 50 most popular add-ons are below:

I think there are a few interesting things to see here. First is that most people are hosting their own developer site, but of the project hosting sites mozdev is by far the most used (I have no idea if this ratio holds across all of AMO and would be interested in doing a more complete survey). There are also a number of projects that had hosted their project on mozdev at one time and are now hosting their own sites (although some of these are still using some of mozdev's developer tools). I think this number is encouraging since it's natural for projects to want their own site once they've reached a certain size and this fits in with our ideas of having mozdev serve as a community incubator.

To answer the original question though, it looks like we could make things easier for a significant fraction of the developer's on AMO by making it easier to manage projects in both places. There are a lot of potential things that could be done (have download files sync across sites so you just need to update once, share account information so people don't need to remember multiple passwords to deal with one extension...). If anyone has ideas for what would be helpful here, please let us know.

The roadmap for mozdev.org was updated earlier this week. The motivation behind these changes was to refocus our efforts on functionality that will benefit Mozilla developers and to address the concerns we've been hearing about the usability of the site. More details about our thought process can be seen on the recent post about the proposed changes.

I wanted to point out some of the bigger changes that were made. We've been planning on adding at least one new version control option for a while and we had initially considered going with Subversion support first. In the roadmap, one of our new top priorities is to add Mercurial support (Subversion support is still planned, but it will come later). Since our mission is to support Mozilla developers, and not open source developers in general, we feel that it is important to stay in sync with Mozilla's development tools and provide other tools that are specific to the Mozilla community.

A number of tasks that should help with the usability of the site have also been added, including making edits to a project's web pages easier, making the creation of new projects a quicker process and redesigning the look of the site. We feel that there are many reasons why a developer working on Mozilla extensions or applications would choose mozdev.org over a general purpose hosting site, but there is no denying that the current design and layout of our site is a far cry from the usability of Google Code.

If there are any comments or suggestions about these changes, feel free to let us know.

For one day a year only, Mozdev goes green. If you stumble upon this post some day other than March 17, here is what it looks like:

Themes are not new to Mozdev. There are at least 12 that you can check out in the Gallery. And unless you apply your own CSS and layout, applying the theme to your project pages is a snip. Add a file called local.conf to your www/ folder and put in the following 2 options:

$local_conf_ignore_holidays=OFF;
$now = time();

See the local.conf documentation for more details on shaping your Mozdev project pages to suit your needs.

There have been some discussions recently about how mozdev's hosting service compares to Google Code. The feedback we've received so far has been very useful, so I wanted to talk about this topic with a wider group to get more comments and suggestions.

I think that one of the biggest advantages that mozdev has is that it is dedicated exclusively to people who are using Mozilla to build extensions and applications. This means that we can focus on providing features (such as creating a way to serve downloads that will work with Firefox 3's secure installation requirements) that a general purpose hosting site, like Google Code, wouldn't offer. I think there is a lot of potential in providing more of these features that apply only to Mozilla developers (for instance, one person mentioned that they had to use 4 different sites to manage their extension, so maybe we could sync information between AMO and mozdev to make developers' lives a little easier).

Another thing that became clear from the discussion threads is that we haven't done a good enough job talking about all of the new functionality we've added to the site recently or that we are planning to add soon. For example, someone mentioned that it was a negative that they couldn't get admin access to their project's Bugzilla account on mozdev. This had been true for a long time, but a few months ago we enabled this option when we upgraded to Bugzilla 3.0. There have also been many complaints about how limiting CVS can be, but the next item on our roadmap (after finishing the secure installation work) is to add at least one more version control option to the site.

Google Code certainly does have an advantage in some areas, but I think it misses the point a bit to compare mozdev with any general purpose hosting site just by looking at the different features available. Over the last eight years, a community of Mozilla extension and application developers has grown up on mozdev and it is these people and their collective experience that is the site's most useful feature. No matter how great Google Code may be, it can't offer that.

If you have any questions, feel free to reply to any of the following bugs:

• Bug#17703 - Drupal install
• Bug#7020 - Blog
• Bug#10166 - Forum
• Bug#17020 - Wiki

Things are just getting under way for us with blogs, forums, and the wiki, so stay tuned for more news.