March 12, 2006

Bugzilla Extensions

With extension mania sweeping Firefox and the Mozilla Project, I figured it was time for Bugzilla to see some extension love too. A patch I wrote back in June when I started my summer with MoFo/MoCo has finally made it into Bugzilla's CVS repositiory to add extensions and code hooks into Bugzilla. This patch lets anyone plug into Bugzilla's source and template files to implement various extensions and new features. The old method of doing this was to distribute patches against CVS, which was often unreliable, a pain to install, and the patches ended up out of date pretty rapidly anyway. This new method allows extensions to be packaged as a single directory hierarchy that can implement custom behavior in a (hopefully) much more reliable and easy to maintain way. Extensions can be used to handle local customizations for installations or add new features (e.g. projman, Litmus integration, etc...)

While the process for creating extensions is slightly cumbersome, the Bugzilla Guide now has a section on The Bugzilla Extension Mechanism that describes the system. If you have questions, you can ask me or The Developers' List.

So, what extension would you like to see?

Posted by zach at 10:19 PM | Comments (5)