Creating a Firefox Toolbar Tutorial
Ok, I’ve needed to do this for quite some time.
I’m gonna go through the Firefox Toolbar Tutorial and post my results and progress here. I’m telling you now, it won’t be something I release to the public, it will be for demonstration purposes only(well, only to the public, it’ll be of good internal use I can assure you that!). I’ll start tomorrow based off the tutorial, adding my own tips and tricks that I’ve gathered over the months I’ve been doing Xul. It’ll be based off of Ajax, and probably jsolait. It’ll be pulling live data from an XML-RPC call to a remote server, I’ll even set up a demo server here for people to use, at least for a short time.
Here are the requirements:
- Static Bookmarks Button - Contains static links to certain admin pages, etc..
- Live Sales Info - Updates total of sales every 10 minutes, mouse can hover to bring up more specifics
- Live Lead Statistics - Brings up the number of leads we’ve gotten in per day, how many have been approved, etc.. Updated every 10 minutes. Mouse can hover to get the biggest sources
The backend will be in PHP with the Pear XML-RPC module. I’ll leave any and all DB calls between you and ADOdb(or your preferred connection method). I’ll keep the example version quite simple with near-static data(You have to show updates to see it working!). For this, we’ll pass a variable to each call called Step, which will range from 0 to 9, starting all stats out at 0, and going up every other step(1,3,5,7,9). The system will then start back over, and all stats will return to 0.
That’s all for now, I’ll update this post as necessary. This’ll be a good learning tool, I’ve only learned how to develop standalone Xul apps, not an in-browser toolbar, believe it or not.
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