AMO Developer Tools Ready for Testing!

With last night’s update to AMO, the new tools I’ve been blogging about are now available to try out. On the en-US Developer Tools index, you should now see an invitation to try out the new tools, which will take you to the new “Developer Dashboard” where all the links will point to new tools. Using the old index will continue using the old tools until the next update when we intend to make the new tools the default and only tools.

Please remember that any changes you make will actually take effect, so if you’re looking for an environment to play around with the new tools without harm or try out uploading a new add-on, just use our preview site, which uses an older snapshot of the database.

If you’d like to report any bugs or feedback, please add it to this wiki page or file a bug in Bugzilla.

For details on the specific new tools, check out my previous posts:

• Edit Add-on: Manage Add-on Authors
• Edit Add-on: Edit Add-on Descriptions
• Edit Add-on: Manage Add-on Categories
• Edit Add-on: Edit Add-on Properties
• Manage Versions and Files
• Manage Previews
• Change Status
• Add-on Uploads

Thanks!

AMO Developer Tools Revamp, Part 8: Add-on Uploads

The last tool of the AMO Developer Tools revamp I’ll be posting about is the uploader used when submitting a new add-on, updating an existing add-on, and adding a file to an existing version. Previous versions of this tool have involved a complicated multi-step process of uploading the file, editing add-on information, editing version information, and finally editing translations. In the revamp, all uploads will have just one step: uploading the file.

Just select your file, the platforms it supports, and the file will be uploaded while you wait on the page. If there’s a problem with the file, you’ll find out immediately:

Otherwise, you’ll be notified of upload success and the next steps to take:

The upload works the same way for every type of upload, but there are some differences before and after the upload depending on the type:

New Add-on Submission
Before uploading, new submissions will go through an introductory screen explaining the features of hosting an add-on on AMO, followed by acceptance of the developer agreement. After a successful add-on upload, the add-on entry will be created as Incomplete. Because the upload process no longer takes the user through editing the add-on details such as name and summary, those must be changed by editing the add-on in the various pages of the Add-on Edit tool. As mentioned in my post on the Status Changer, the add-on must be “completed” before it will be moved to the Sandbox and appear to users.

New Version of Existing Add-on
Developers uploading a new version to an existing add-on will immediately be presented with the upload box, and upon successful upload, the new version is created and the file is marked for editor review if the add-on is public.

Adding a File to an Existing Version
A new feature with the revamp is the ability to add a file to any existing version. From the Manage Versions and Files page, just click Add File and upload the file. This is the method used to upload multiple platform-specific files to a version.

Language Packs and Search Plugins
Language Packs should now be automatically detected upon upload and should no longer have any problems with uploading new versions, editing metadata, etc.

User-submitted search engines will now be permitted on AMO. Previously we had a few popular search engines in the Search Tools area of the site, but we’re opening that up for anyone to submit their OpenSearch search plugin. We’re planning on making the display pages and search/browse listings a bit more search plugin friendly, but uploading shouldn’t be a problem now using the new tool.

Well, that’s the last of my posts detailing specific parts of the revamp. The next post will be information on how you can try out these new tools, report bugs, and give us feedback on them before they launch fully.

Previous post: Change Status

AMO Developer Tools Revamp, Part 7: Change Status

The revamp of the Developer Tools area of AMO has a brand new tool called the Status Changer. This tool provides an interface to see what the status of your add-on currently is, what that status means, and how to get to a higher status if applicable.

The interface has two main areas: one shows the status level of the add-on: whether it’s Incomplete, In Sandbox, Public, etc. The other area shows whether the add-on is currently marked as active or inactive. The content of the page varies depending on what status an add-on is currently in, but I’ll highlight a few common states below.

Incomplete
Due to changes in the add-on upload process, which will be discussed in my next post, when an add-on is first submitted to the site, it will be marked as Incomplete. Incomplete add-ons don’t show up anywhere, not even the sandbox, until they are “completed”. The status page for an Incomplete add-on looks like this:

There are 4 requirements to complete an add-on, which are shown on the status page, along with the progress of each. The requirements are filling in the add-on name, summary, description, and seleting at least one category for the add-on. These requirements are not new, just presented in a different way because of the upload process changes. Once all 4 are complete, a button will appear allowing you to complete your add-on and move it to the sandbox.

In Sandbox
Once the add-on is in the sandbox, the status page will change to show the 3 requirements to nominate an add-on to become Public. These requirements are having at least one preview image, having some user reviews of the add-on, and making sure the add-on is not marked as pre-release.

The In Sandbox status page looks like this:

Preview images have always been required for themes, but requiring it for extensions is new. Reviews have also always been required to become public, but because outside reviews are also accepted, not having this requirement complete will not prevent nomination. The nomination button will become available once all requirements are complete, with the exception of user reviews.

Once nominated, the status page will show the number of other nominated add-ons awaiting editor review.

Public
After an editor makes an add-on public, the status page is home to a new feature for authors of public add-ons: the ability to toggle your add-on between public and the sandbox. This update introduces a new add-on field that keeps track of an add-on’s highest obtained status, so that if an add-on author moves the add-on back to the sandbox, it will be able to be moved back public at any time without editor assistance. This may be useful if, for example, you know your add-on has a big bug that will take some time to fix.

The main purpose of the status page, regardless of the add-on’s status, is to better document what your add-on’s status means as far as available site features, and how to achieve a higher status.

In the next post I’ll talk about the new uploader, which will better explain why the “Incomplete” status works the way it does now.

Previous post: Manage Previews
Next post: Add-on Uploads

AMO Developer Tools Revamp, Part 6: Manage Previews

It’s been about 4 months since I posted about the status of the AMO Developer Tools Revamp. Later this week, the beta versions of these tools currently available in production AMO will be upgraded and 3 new tools will be added. I’ll post more details about that on Friday, but wanted to highlight the features of the 3 new tools.

First up is the revamped Preview Manager:

The only specific new features with the preview manager are the ability to replace a preview’s image without losing the caption’s translations and the ability to upload multiple previews at once. The main improvement is that the management of all previews is on a single page instead of separate pages without a real connection to each other.

With this new preview manager also comes a revamp of how preview URLs across the site are formatted, which will fix the very frustrating and longstanding bug where making changes to preview images wouldn’t show up for hours.

Next up will be a post on the new Status Changer tool.

Previous post: Manage Versions and Files
Next post: Change Status

Add-on Developers: Tell us what you think!

If you’ve developed or tried to develop an add-on for Firefox, we’d like your feedback to know what we can do to improve that experience through documentation, tools, and features. Please take a few minutes to answer our survey. Your responses will be anonymous, and every response will be read.

Thank you.

A note on add-on stats this week

Add-on developers who log in to AMO and check their stats dashboard may be very happy to find that their active daily users have increased quite a bit this week (my own add-on reports a 46% increase since last week). I wanted to remind developers how we determine ADU and why it is slightly skewed this week.

By default, Firefox will check an add-on’s updateURL every 24 hours to look for an update. Add-ons that don’t have an updateURL specified default to AMO, which is how we determine how many “active daily users” an add-on has. The number of times an add-on’s GUID was pinged on AMO is approximately how many people were using that add-on that day.

In addition to the 24 hour checks, the same URL is pinged for several other reasons such as manually checking for updates, Firefox installations and upgrades, and installed add-on detection for Rock Your Firefox. Unfortunately, there’s not currently a way to differentiate these types of pings, so they are all counted as active daily users instead of only the scheduled pings. (see bug 392180)

So, this week’s large increase can be attributed to a couple things:

• Downloads - Most add-ons also had a huge increase in the number of downloads this week. My own add-on went from 3,000 downloads per day to hitting 16,000 on Wednesday. If your add-on’s install.rdf doesn’t say it’s compatible with the Firefox version installed, Firefox will ping AMO to see if there’s a new version or if this version actually is compatible. (This is how you can update your compatibility on AMO without uploading a new version.)
• Firefox 3 installations - When users upgrade Firefox to a new version of Firefox 2 or to Firefox 3, it will ping AMO for every extension installed to see if there’s a new maxVersion. After that, it displays a list of incompatible add-ons and offers the ability to check for new versions. (Thanks to Dave Townsend for researching this.)

Both of these will result in one or more additional update pings, as the compatibility will still be checked every 24 hours as usual.

And now, some aggregate statistics for your enjoyment:

Total downloads from AMO last Tuesday (6/10) and Wednesday (6/11): 932,072 + 985,229 = 1,917,301
Total downloads from AMO this Tuesday (6/17) and Wednesday (6/18): 2,454,024 + 4,472,336 = 6,926,360

Update pings to AMO from hosted add-ons last Wednesday (6/11): 115,375,160
Update pings to AMO from hosted add-ons this Wednesday (6/18): 141,233,285
(I expect Thursday’s ADU count is a good bit higher than Wednesday’s.)

Preview of New AMO Developer Tools

With the release of AMO 3.4.3 tonight, there’s now a way to try out the new Developer Tools that I’ve been blogging about.

From the en-US Developer Tools, click on “Edit Add-on” next to one of your hosted add-ons. At the top of the edit page, you’ll see a box that offers a try-out of the new edit tools.

The following new tools are available:

• Edit Add-on: Manage Add-on Authors
• Edit Add-on: Manage Add-on Categories
• Edit Add-on: Edit Add-on Descriptions
• Edit Add-on: Edit Add-on Properties
• Manage Versions and Files

The tools are accessible on preview.addons.mozilla.org as well, if you don’t want your changes to affect the production database.

If you find any bugs or have any feedback, please file a bug or add it to the wiki.

AMO Developer Tools Revamp, Part 5: Manage Versions and Files

The next area of AMO Developer Tools being revamped is managing add-on versions and files. Here are some screenshots of the new look:

Listing of all versions:

Editing a specific version:

Changes/new features:

• Ability to delete “empty” versions that have no files
• Ability to add files to a specific version, not just the latest version
• Ability to add and remove target applications, where previously you could only change the minVersion and maxVersions of existing target applications.
• Documentation explaining what all the fields do
• Cleaner/better interface, allowing for future enhancements around versions and files

Feedback/Comments/Suggestions? Comment on this post or in the bug.

Previous post: Edit Add-on Properties
Next post: Manage Previews

AMO Developer Tools Revamp, Part 4: Edit Add-on Properties

The new Edit Properties page of the AMO Developer Tools area is where the main settings of an add-on can be configured. The available fields on this new page are: Add-on Name, Default Locale, Add-on Icon, Homepage, Support Email Address and Website, and other add-on flags such as viewing the source online. These fields were previously mixed in the single edit add-on page.

Some screenshots of the new layout:

The only new field for this page is a flag for add-ons that contain binary components. The localizable Add-on Name, homepage, and support fields were previously on the Edit Descriptions page, but were moved here where they make more sense. One of the biggest wins of the new layout is the explanation of what each field does, consistent with the rest of the revamp.

If you have any feedback, please comment here or in the bug.

Previous post: Part 3, Manage Add-on Categories
Next post: Part 5, Manage Versions and Files

AMO Developer Tools Revamp, Part 3: Manage Add-on Categories

In last week’s part 2 preview of the upcoming changes to AMO’s Developer Tools area, I posted some screenshots of the new Edit Descriptions page. Before getting to the preview of the next page, I wanted to give some more information on AMO milestone 3.5’s schedule. After all of the sections of the new Edit Add-on area are finished, they’ll be pushed live to AMO where developers will have the option to try out the new edit pages rather than use the current one. This will give the new pages enough testing to make sure they’re ready to take over, while providing an alternative in case any major bugs are found. The current edit page will remain the default until 3.5 is officially launched after various other revamp pages and finished, localized, and tested.

Now, on to part 3: the Manage Add-on Categories page. This is what the Edit Categories experience currently is:

And this is the new version:

Notable changes include:

• Instead of one multi-select box with all categories for all supported applications, each supported application has its own box with a separate selection box for up to 3 categories.
• Validation was based on all categories and inconsistent, whereas now there is a hard limit of 3 categories per application.
• The Other/Miscellaneous category for each application was unregulated and many add-ons were in several normal categories in addition to the “Other” or “Miscellaneous” category. Now, an add-on can either be in 1-3 real categories or only the Other/Miscellaneous category.

As always, if you have any comments or suggestions, please leave a comment here. Thanks for reading!

Next, part 4: Edit Add-on Properties