We recently partnered with the Mozilla Open Innovation team to launch an activity that would introduce developers to WebExtensions and guide them through the experience of creating new add-ons with the APIs. The “Build Your Own WebExtension Add-on For Firefox” activity launched in February as part of Mozilla’s Activate campaign to mobilize Mozillians around the world to have impact in key areas of the organization’s mission. This activity will run until the end of 2017.
Mozilla communities in Tamilnadu, Switzerland, and Brazil answered the call-to-action and recently hosted events using the Activate curriculum. To date, 54 people have attended these events, and participants have submitted seven new add-ons to addons.mozilla.org. (If you are curious to see what they have built, take a look at this this collection on AMO.)
If you’re interested in hosting an event, read on to find out how our communities have organized their events, and what they would recommend for best practices!
Tamilnadu
Viswaprasanth Ks has been a passionate member of the add-ons community since he started contributing to Mozilla in 2012. He recently led an add-ons track at the Tamilnadu community’s 24 Hour Hackathon, where 25 participants brainstormed and created their own extensions to solve real-world problems.
What we learned
Encourage participants to learn JavaScript and have them start learning extension development from the mdn-web extension repo, recommends Viswaprasanth. Those with less familiarity with HTML and JavaScript might need additional support to complete the activity. Plus, the examples listed in the mdn-web extension repo have been carefully evaluated as being good starting places for beginning developers.
Photo by Viswaprasanth Ks
Switzerland
Michael Kohler slated this activity for one of Mozilla Switzerland’s monthly meet-ups and tapped long-time add-ons contributor Martin Giger to mentor a group of 10 participants. Attendees found the workshop to be a relaxing introduction to extension development and left the event feeling empowered and confident in their abilities to create add-ons using WebExtensions APIs.
What we learned
Anticipate that it will take 90 minutes to complete Part I of the curriculum. “We used around 90 minutes to get to a working first example, including the intro,” Michael reports. If you are only able to complete Part I during an event, consider scheduling a follow-up event where participants can continue creating extensions in a fun, supportive atmosphere.
Photo by Michael Kohler
Brazil
What can 22 Brazilians and 30 liters of beer accomplish in one day? Quite a bit, according to Andre Garzia’s blog post about his recent event. After a discussion about extension development and a group brainstorming session, participants organized themselves into small groups and worked on ten add-ons.
What we learned
Provide some starter ideas to those who want to go beyond the initial tutorial and build their own original add-on. Andre writes in his post, “We knew from the start that telling people to come out with add-on ideas out of the blue would not be an effective way to engage everybody. People have different ways to come up with ideas and some don’t enjoy coming up with an idea on the spot like this. To help people out, we made a clothesline where we hung add-on ideas up. Each idea had a description, suggested APIs to use and a difficulty/complexity rate. Attendees were encouraged to browse our hanging ideas and take one to implement if they felt like it.”
Note: if you need help developing a list of starter ideas, take a look at this list of requests from users on Discourse.
Photo by Andre Garzia
Have you conducted an add-ons development workshop for your community or are you interested in hosting one? Tell us about it on Discourse!
The add-ons team would like to extend a hearty thank you to Viswaprasanth Ks and Daniele Scasciafratte for providing input and tutorials for the “Build Your Own WebExtension Add-on” activity, and to Michael Kohler, Viswaprasanth Ks, and Andrew Garzia for coordinating these events.
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