Mozilla Developer DevNews: about:mozilla - Test week, SeaMonkey, Mozilla Education, Mozilla.org redesign, Graph server, SUMO, Tinderbox and much more?

In this issue?

• Firefox 3.1 beta 3 test week is on now!
• The new (draft) SeaMonkey vision
• New Mozilla Education weekly call
• Redesigning the Mozilla.org website
• Extension developer survey
• Graph server rewrite
• Ubiquity and Weave documentation
• Analytics and Firefox support (SUMO)
• New SUMO identity system
• Tinderbox pushlog - a new tinderbox tool
• Avoiding extension security vulnerabilities
• Dave Humphrey on Mozilla Education
• L20N - localization architecture evolving
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla
• Subscribe to the email newsletter

Firefox 3.1 beta 3 test week is on now!

Mozilla?s QA team needs your help testing Firefox 3.1 beta 3 this week. ?MozQA is trying a new event called Test Week. This is sort of Bugday and Testday rolled together but spread out over an entire week. We?re changing to this format to improve flexibility for you, our QA community. In addition to the scheduled Bugday (Tuesday) and Testday (Friday) times, tasks will be posted that anyone can work on at anytime during the week.? This Test Week is focusing on Firefox 3.1 beta 3, and all the details, including links to the versions of Firefox being tested, are available at the QMO weblog.

The new (draft) SeaMonkey vision

Robert Kaiser unveiled the ?near-to-final? draft of the new SeaMonkey vision at FOSDEM this past week, and has since blogged about it as well. ?After our initial goals of making the suite survive and porting it to toolkit have been reached, it?s time to have some guidelines for the future of the project. The topics ? integration, configurability, innovation, security and stability ? are not ordered by importance but are all at the same level and taking the same space in the project.? Robert?s post goes on to present the full draft version of the SeaMonkey vision.

New Mozilla Education weekly call

Frank Hecker writes, ?As is evident from Mark Surman?s recent ?Why Mozilla Education?? post and all the stuff we?ve been adding to the Mozilla Education planning page, we?re getting involved with a lot of activities around the general theme of Mozilla and education.? In order to coordinate all these activities, the Mozilla Foundation is now holding a weekly Mozilla Education meeting by telephone, every Monday at 8am Pacific time (11am Eastern, 1600 UTC). For more information and dial-in details, see Frank?s blog post.

Redesigning the Mozilla.org website

The Mozilla Foundation is starting a project to create a new design for the www.mozilla.org website, and they?re looking for help. ?There are no designs to look at yet, but we have started posting some information on the wiki, including a design brief and a feedback page for initial ideas and comments. There hasn?t been a redesign in over four years, and the current look does not reflect the site?s current role of being an entry point for the entire community. We don?t know what the new design should look like, but we?ll figure it all out with the community as we kick off this design project.? Read more about the upcoming site redesign project over at David Boswell?s weblog.

Extension developer survey

The AMO team is working hard on improving the Firefox extension development experience. ?From lots of impromptu conversations with our developer community, we know that there?s a lot we can do to help at all stages in the developer life cycle. We?re still pulling together ideas and we want to get you involved by asking you to let us know what you think.? The survey is available now, so if you?re an extension developer please take some time to help the AMO team out. ?We?ll follow up in a couple of weeks with results and plan some sessions where we can engage directly on the future of extensions and AMO.?

Graph server rewrite

Ryan Doherty and the Graph Server team have been hard at work re-writing the server?s back end code. ?The Graph Server is used to display performance test data of Firefox builds reported by Talos. Our work initially started as performance improvements and some new features, but the more we worked with the old architecture, it became quite apparent it would not scale.? The new architecture is cleaner, eliminates duplicated data, and makes it easier to understand the various machines, branches and tests that are used for displaying test data. In addition, the scripts used to fetch test information have been rewritten as a JSON API, and the communication layer between Talos and the Graph server has been redone. ?After all that work, we now have a working stage server (Firefox 3.1 or higher required due to native JSON requirement) with our new code. We have a bit more testing and some performance benchmarking to do before it goes live, but we?re happy all the pieces are working.? If you would like to know more, read Ryan?s blog post and the project?s wiki page.

Ubiquity and Weave documentation

The Mozilla Labs team has posted new documentation for both the Weave and Ubiquity projects. ?We?ve just added a page of documentation about the Ubiquity parser to the Mozilla wiki. It explains the algorithms used, with lots of examples and links to particular functions in the source code.? As for Weave, ?Did you know that Weave is also built to be extended? Weave isn?t limited to just syncing those types of data ? cookies, history, tabs, etc. ? which have support built-in. It has a client API which allows new sync engines to be written and plugged in. A sync engine implements some logic for reading, writing, and updating a new data type; the Weave core handles the networking, encryption, and synchronization.? You can find the Weave client API documentation on the Mozilla wiki as well. See Jono?s blog posts ? Ubiquity, Weave ? for details.

Analytics and Firefox support (SUMO)

The Mozilla Metrics team has been doing some analytics work related to the Firefox Support (SUMO) project. ?Over the past year, SUMO has grown into one of the most critical activities within the Mozilla community. David Tenser and the SUMO group have done a stellar job of maintaining a SUMO metrics report, and to complement that, I?ve recently been talking with David about the broader story of a typical user?s experience with SUMO.? The rest of the post goes into how users find SUMO in the first place, and what the a user?s most common interaction is with the site. The results are really interesting, and include the remarkable stats that SUMO saw almost 13 million visitors last month and that 71% of those visitors arrived at the site through the ?Firefox Help? menu item in the browser. Read more at the Blog of Metrics.

New SUMO identity system

In other SUMO news, the SUMO Identity System has been unveiled, continuing a project that started several months ago. ?The SUMO identity system has several components. These include the primary logos which are for general use (like the SUMO blog), and SUMO signatures that incorporate ?open source support? as a supplemental tag line communicating the broader scope of the project. The new logo is an exciting part of SUMO?s evolution and will serve as a unifying brand element for its community.? But the project isn?t finished yet. Tara writes, ?We?ve created a framework where your designs may also become part of the SUMO logo. The identity system simply wouldn?t be complete without another layer of community involvement ? and I?ll be sharing more information on what that means very soon!?

Tinderbox pushlog - a new tinderbox tool

Last week Markus Strange launched (and Johnathan Nightingale blogged about) the new Tinderbox pushlog tool. This tool provides a running Tinderbox changelog with associated builds and status, along with an at-a-glace view of the current tree in the bottom right and details of the selected run in the bottom left. Please note that this tool requires Firefox 3.1, and that Markus is accepting patches if you have ideas for how it could be changed or improved.

Avoiding extension security vulnerabilities

Justin Scott writes, ?Over on the Adblock Plus blog, Wladimir Palant has posted two great articles on how to avoid making some common mistakes in extension development that lead to security vulnerabilities. I highly recommend extension authors check out his posts: Displaying web content in an extension - without security issues, and Five wrong reasons to use eval() in an extension.?

Dave Humphrey on Mozilla Education

Mark Surman has been blogging about the plans and rationale for Mozilla Education recently, and has now posted an interview with Dave Humphrey from Seneca College on the topic. ?Dave has been offering a Mozilla-based course for a number of years. Now he wants to open up the materials, community and mentorship system he?s been using to students and professors all over the world. In addition to extending the Seneca program for students and profs everywhere, Dave has agreed to help lead the process of thinking through and rolling out Mozilla Education.? Frank Hecker and Dave will be hosting the new weekly Mozilla Education calls on Mondays at 11am Eastern (8am Pacific, 1600 UTC). Like other Mozilla calls, these are open to anyone who is interested in participating.

L20N - localization architecture evolving

L20N is the codename for a localization architecture that takes existing localization approaches a step further, and that is being written about extensively on the Mozilla wiki. Seth Bindernagel has posted about the work Axel Hecht has been doing on this project. ?I really suggest everyone take some time to read through this wiki to get a better sense of what l20n is and how to contribute. I hope you take the time to comment on it, blog about it, email me, etc. We are not ready to implement l20n, but we are certainly ready to discuss.? More information is available on Seth?s blog and on the L20N wiki.

Developer calendar

For an up-to-date list of the coming week?s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page.

About about:mozilla

about:mozilla is by, for and about the Mozilla community, focusing on major news items related to all aspects of the Mozilla Project. The newsletter is written by Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning. If you have any news or announcements you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.

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