Firefox Extension Workshop

Welcome to Firefox Extension Workshop, a launchpad for building Firefox extensions! 🚀

Updating Content

If you would like to update content or other resources on Firefox Extension Workshop, please refer to contributing.md

Development Guide: Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes.

For notes on how to deploy the project on a live system, see Deployment.

Prerequisites

• Node JS. Runnning the LTS release is recommended.
• Yarn for package management.

yarn install

To start local development, run:

yarn start

ℹ️ NOTE: Running locally will show unpublished content that uses the published: false convention in frontmatter. Content with published: false will not be available on staging or production.

Available yarn commands

Command	Description
yarn start	Starts eleventy and includes unpublished content.
yarn build:production	Builds the site for production.
yarn build:unpublished	Builds the site for production with unpublished content.
yarn clean	Clears the output directory. (You probably won't need to use this manually.)

How the site is built

The site is built with Eleventy, a NodeJS-based static site generator.

The site works in slightly different ways depending on whether you're running the site for local development or building the site for production.

Development builds

When you run yarn start the CSS and JS is built in parallel with the eleventy build. Once up and running both eleventy and the JS and CSS build scripts watch for changes. When something changes the site is re-built.

In development Eleventy knows nothing about the CSS and JavaScript builds. For automatic reloading of the JS and CSS, each script uses a fetch to the public API to tell browserSync there is new code and it reloads it for you.

Production builds

Building for production is slightly different. The Eleventy process and the JS and CSS builds happen in series. Then a 3rd asset-pipeline process initiates and takes the the built content from ./build directory and runs it through various optimizations.

During these optimizations, the following takes place:

• Binary files are versioned with hashes in the file names.
• References to these file in CSS and JS are updated.
• CSS and JS are minified.
• The HTML is processed to update the references to the assets new hash-based filenames.

All of this means that we can serve the site with far-future Expires headers. If the resource is in the browser's cache, the browser won't even make a request for it. To break the cache, the resource's URL needs to change. When something is updated and the script is re-run, the hash in the filename will change, so the new filename won't be cached and the browser will know to fetch it. This helps the site be fast.

Whilst the asset-pipline script is custom, it leverages a lot of existing libs where possible, these include Terser, postHTML, postCSS, and various plugins.

It's likely that some day, 11ty will have its own mechanism for wrangling assets. At that point, this will no longer be required.

Asset paths

For the asset-pipeline script to do its thing, all you need to do is refer to all assets with a path beginning with /assets/. If you do that, everything else is handled for you ✨

Development Guide: Content Updates

This site has three templates:

1. A full-width page
2. A sidebar "page" for documentation
3. A Content Guidelines page

Repo layout

extensionworkshop.com
├── bin
│   ├── asset-pipeline           # The asset build script
│   ├── build-script             # The JS build script
│   └── build-styles             # The CSS build script
│
├── build                        # Where eleventy builds the site to
│
├── dist                         # Where production builds are built
│
├── libs
│   ├── markdown.js              # The markdown renderer instance and plugins
│   ├── slugify.js               # The central slug function
│   └── templates.js             # The liquidjs template instance
│
├── screenshots                  # Screenshots used in README.md
│
├── src
│   ├── assets                   # Assets (CSS, JavaScript, fonts and images)
│   ├── content                  # Content (Markdown and JS (generated))
│   ├── data                     # Data files (JSON)
│   ├── includes                 # Components (Liquid)
│   └── layouts                  # Layout templates
│
├── tests                        # Test files run by jest `yarn test`.
│
├── eleventy.config.js           # Eleventy configuration
├── .eleventyignore              # Files ignored by Eleventy
├── .gitignore                   # Files not tracked by Git
├── .stylelintrc                 # Stylelint configuration
├── .prettierrc                  # Prettier config
├── .prettierignore              # Files ignored by prettier
├── .eslintrc                    # eslint config
├── .eslintignore                # Files ignored by eslint
├── package.json                 # Node.js package manifest
├── renovate.json                # Renovate configuration
├── yarn.lock                    # Package manager lock file
└── README.md                    # This file

Uploading media

1. Add the image files to src/assets/img/
2. In your page, link to images using this page structure:

You can reference images with the full path from the assets/ directory (e.g, /assets/img/image.png).

Here's an example in markdown:

![Remembear subtitle screenshot](/assets/img/remembear-subtitle.png "Remembear subtitle text")

Adding notes and alerts

For a note, use the markdown syntax extensions as follows. (These markdown extensions are supplied by a plugin to the markdown renderer.)

::: note
This is a note
:::

Looks like this

For an alert, use the following:

::: note alert
This is an alert
:::

Looks like this

How to add a "sidebar" layout page

1. Open data/pages.json.
2. Add a node with appropriate attributes, in the appropriate location, for the new page. See below: Understanding the pages.json structure.
3. Create a new page, nested inside a folder struture that matches the URL path. For example, for permalink /documentation/develop/best-practices-for-collecting-user-data-consents/, you would create a file called best-practices-for-collecting-user-data-consents.md and place it in documentation ▶︎ develop.
4. For reference on how to create a page, review the sidebar-master-template.md file, which lists all available modules. Some notes:
   • published: false will withhold this content from staging and production. To publish content, remove this line.
   • skip_index: true is used for pages that shouldn't be indexed for search results.
   • When creating page sections that should be listed in the table of contents, add an id attribute to the section container that matches the subpageitems entry added to pages.json. If your layout requires several sections for one table of contents entry, nest your sections inside a containing element which has the id attribute.
   • Rule for creating section ids: use the h2 title of the section, converted to lowercase, spaces replaced with dashes, all non-alphanumeric characters removed. For example, the section h2 title "Know your privacy settings" would be converted to know-your-privacy-settings for the section id.
   • The first section following the "Page Hero" module should be the "Table of Contents" module: modules/column-w-toc.html.

Understanding the pages.json structure

• Each page has a title and url attribute.
  ℹ️ NOTE: The url attribute must exactly match the permalink attribute of the page's front matter (including leading and trailing slashes).
• Pages may also have a subpageitems node for sections within the page to be referenced in the table of contents for that page:
  • Each subpageitem node has a title and id attribute. The value of id matches the id attribute of the section container.
    (ℹ️ NOTE: ids must be added to the containing element, rather than the heading element, of the section. This ensures that highlighting for the section remains active, even when the section title is out of view.)
• Overview pages have category nodes for each of their contained (sub) categories.
• Categories have a category attibute (which denotes the category title), and a pages attribute (which lists sub-pages of the overview page).
• The Documentation Topics section pages are nested inside a subfolderitems node, which creates the dropdown panel.

General overview of the pages.json layout:

[
  {
    "title": "Documentation Topics",
    "subfolderitems": [
      {
        "title": "Develop",
        "url": "/documentation/develop/",
        "subpageitems": [
          {
            "title": "Firefox Tools",
            "id": "firefox-tools"
          }
        ],
        "categories": [
          {
            "category": "Getting Started",
            "pages": [
              {
                "title": "Firefox Workflow Overview",
                "url": "/documentation/develop/firefox-workflow-overview/"
              }
            ]
          }
        ]
      },
      {
        "title": "Publish",
        "url": "/documentation/publish/",
        "subpageitems": [
          {
            "title": "Get your extension signed",
           "id": "get-your-extension-signed"
          }
        ]
      },
      {
        "title": "Manage",
        "url": "/documentation/manage/",
        "subpageitems": [
          {
            "title": "Stay informed when Firefox changes",
            "id": "stay-informed-when-firefox-changes"
          }
        ]
      },
      {
        "title": "Enterprise",
        "url": "/documentation/enterprise/",
        "subpageitems": [
          {
            "title": "Section Title",
            "id": "introduction"
          }
        ]
      },
      {
        "title": "Themes",
        "url": "/documentation/themes/",
        "subpageitems": [
          {
            "title": "What themes are",
            "id": "what-themes-are"
          }
        ]
      }
    ]
  },
  {
    "title": "Extension Basics",
    "url": "/extension-basics/",
    "subpageitems": [
      {
        "title": "Getting started",
        "id": "getting-started"
      }
    ]
  },
  {
    "title": "Community",
    "url": "/community/",
    "subpageitems": [
      {
        "title": "Who is part of the community?",
        "id": "who-is-part-of-the-community"
      }
    ],
    "categories": [
      {
        "category": "About the Community",
        "pages": [
          {
            "title": "",
            "url": ""
          }
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
]

How to add a "Content Guidelines" page

Create a new page

1. Create new file
2. Add frontmatter (see example below)
3. Copy 'modules' needed from content-guidelines/master-template.md and paste in new file
4. Save as markdown: content-guidelines/page-name.md

---
layout: guides
title: Page Name
permalink: /content-guidelines/page-name/
published: false
---

ℹ️ NOTE: published: false will withhold this content from staging and production. To publish content, remove this line.

Add the page to the menu

Go to data/content-guidelines-pages.json and add a new entry for your page:

{
  "title": "Page Name",
  "url": "/content-guidelines/page-name/",
  "draft-label": true
}

Controlling draft labelling

If you don't want the page to be labelled as a draft (such as and when it's ready), remove "draft-label": true from the relevant entry in data/content-guidelines-pages.json.

Deployment

All deployments for staging and production are handled via the Releases page.

Dev Deploys

The site is auto-deployed on commits to master to https://extensionworkshop-dev.allizom.org/. You can check the version on -dev with the dev version link.

Stage Deploys

Tags with a version ending in -stage will be deployed to https://extensionworkshop.allizom.org/. You can check the version on stage with the stage version link.

A good example tag for a stage deploy would be v2.0.1-stage.

Production Deploys

Tags of the format vN.N.N will be deployed to https://extensionworkshop.com/. You can check the version on production with the production version link.

A good example tag for a production deploy would be v2.0.1.

Version numbers

Tag versions should aim to follow the semver format.