Personas Update Released

oremj

8 responses

Personas for Firefox is a prototype extension that adds easy-to-style, easy-to-change skins to the browser.

The Personas project launched six weeks ago with a friendlier look and feel, improved functionality, and an expanded set of categories. Since that time, we have been working with the community to make the Personas user experience better and have done so through a series of three quick website releases, and one extension release. Here are a few of the key modifications that were made since Personas 1.0:

  • Added Designer Detail Pages: the Personas community now has over 7K designers that have submitted over 10,000 designs. As the gallery expands, it becomes increasingly important for each designer to have their own personal space within the site to display their creations. We solved this problem by creating designer detail pages for each artist (see graphic below).
  • Localized in Additional Languages : the Personas extension is now localized in Polish, Serbian, Turkish, and Chinese. This is in addition to the other 12 languages that were supported during the last launch, including Spanish, German, Bulgarian, Danish, French, Italian, Japanese, and Portuguese. In the future, we plan to localize the website with these languages.
  • Ported to Thunderbird: thanks largely to the contributions of Huang Yaoquan, Personas can now be installed on Thunderbird. Integrating the extension into Thunderbird is a work in progress (see buglist), and Huang and others are continuing to make progress.
  • Enabled Sharing: it is now easy for you to share Personas art work you admire with your friends. Each design’s detail page now has a ShareThis link.
  • Pagination: as the Pesonas gallery continues to expand, it became increasingly important to organize the art in a way that enables you to browse all designs without performance issues. We included pagination in the All/All section of the gallery so that your browser loads the full gallery in sections, rather than 10,000+ designs at one time.

lee-tom-personas

What’s Next?

The Personas project will continue to evolve quickly with your ideas and feedback. If you have thoughts on how to make Personas better, please discuss and debate them with the community in our discussion group or add a solution to our newly created support wiki. We will continue to update you with the progress of the project.

– Suneel Gupta and Toby Elliott, on behalf of the Personas development team

8 responses

  1. suneel gupta wrote on :

    You can visit our discussion group regarding additional questions. It is located at: http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla-labs-personas

  2. James Romero wrote on :

    On the Personas home page under Frequently Asked Questions I cannot seem to find info on who to contact regarding additional questions. Can you help? I have successfully downloaded Personas and love the different skins except the skin I selected is “stuck” and I cannot change it or remove it. What should I do? Thank you.

  3. Jason wrote on :

    I wasn’t even aware of firefox personas. I just watched the demo video on the website and now I am wondering what’s the difference between personas and a regular theme?

  4. suneel gupta wrote on :

    we are working on integrating search into the gallery. see here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=489246. agreed that it would be valuable given the scale of the gallery. thanks for your ideas.

  5. Wim wrote on :

    Also added are the Dutch (nl) and Frisian (fy-NL) translation.

  6. Alhabib wrote on :

    I did not see SEARCH feature on the Personas page. I think it is an essential feature for 10.000 and growing collections…

  7. Kim wrote on :

    Any chance we’ll be able to search the gallery?
    As it is now it’s nigh impossible to give someone a link to the Persona you use.

  8. Tomer Cohen wrote on :

    We are willing to translate it to Hebrew, but we will need some basic RTL features to the theme. The main issue for us is that some themes have an image at the right side which will be less visible on RTL as the browser controls will be on top of the image. In order to solve it, we will need the personas API to be able to flip horizontally the background, and the theme author to indicate if RTL should mirror the backgrounds or not (in order to make texts readable).

    I’ll be able to discuss on this subject in case you want to more investigate in this area.

    https://www.mozdev.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=18895