Xinha Here! Firefox Extension
Published Wednesday, November 9th, 2005 at 7:39 pm
In my last post documenting my
experience installing WordPress I mentioned that I installed the Xinha4WP plugin. I was very
impressed by the plugin and the Xinha
editor itself. The Xinha editor is an offshoot of HTMLArea which is an integral part of the MegaBBS forum system
I use (and have contributed to). I really feel these little HTML editors are
very handy and every web developer should include or better yet make it an
integral part of Firefox.
A day or so later I noticed that Mozilla is running an "Extend Firefox"
competition. That gave me the idea… why not package Xinha as a Firefox
extension. That way not matter what site I visit I can have my favorite HTML
editor handy. Most likely not a worthy entry into the contest but an interesting project non the less.
The following weekend (ignoring pleads from my wife to clean the house or other such nonsense) I developed what I’m calling Xinha Here! With this extension you can add HTML to any textbox or textarea on any website. You simply select the textbox (or textarea), right click, and selected Xinha Here! Up will pop a Xinha editor for your WYSIWYG pleasure. Press OK and the raw HTML is pushed back to the original textbox. Simple as that. I would also suspect that because the Xinha source and images are located within the extension (not on the web) it may be faster to load then the web version.
Xinha Here! can be downloaded here. Beware that this is my first Firefox extension and only version 0.1 so there are bound to be some bugs. I’ve only tested it with Firefox 1.0.7 so your mileage may vary. The current implementation doesn’t allow any of customization of Xinha. Enjoy!
November 10th, 2005 at 3:32 am
What a very cool idea! I know a lot of people who would love to try this out, myself included!
November 10th, 2005 at 7:38 am
Xinha for Firefox
Do you wish you had Xinha available for textareas on all websites? Now you can!…
November 11th, 2005 at 12:39 am
Nice Firefox plugin, I just installed it and it works like a charm. Nice to see that you prioritize such important development as this, before such trivial work as house cleaning. Though I have a feeling your wife might dissagree, :)
November 13th, 2005 at 8:26 am
Could you please say some word’s how it’s working. I’ve installed the plugin, but don’t know how to use it.
November 13th, 2005 at 10:50 am
River,
Once Xinha Here is installed you need to first restart
Firefox. After that place your cursor inside any text box as
if you are going to type. Right click and select Xinha
Here. You should then get a pop up with a Xinha editor. It
should like similar to the text box you type into to leave your
comment. Typewhat you like and select OK to put the HTML back into the original text
box. This is intended for websites that accept HTML data in their
text boxs… not all do.
November 29th, 2005 at 4:10 pm
Hi,Do you know if the Xinha extension decides when to be active or not? For instance, when I right clicked on this comment box it wasn’t an option. If I do it on a Drupal site, it doesn’t show up. When I use it on an INvision forum it works. Thanks!
November 29th, 2005 at 10:31 pm
Patrick,
Yes, The Xinha extension will only work when the item your clicking on is a text box or a text area. When you posted your comment here you may have noticed the toolbar at the top? My comments text areas are already Xinha editors. You cannot invoke Xinha on a WYSIWYG editor.
November 30th, 2005 at 6:35 am
hmmm. I’m not having any lucking seeing it in the context menu, on any edit areas. Strangely I’m also not seeing any indication that your comment area is anything other than a comment area.
I really want this to work, what can I do to help debug?
(FWIW - I just upgraded to FireFox 1.5, and I’m using a couple other text area extentions, my guess is some cross incompatibilities with xinha and either resizeable text areas or Tabinta. Will do some experimentation then check back).
November 30th, 2005 at 9:54 am
I temporally disabled Xinha4wp for comments on my site. I was having issues unrelated to Xinha Here extension.
I could imaging that Xinha Here might not be computable with other text area extensions. I will test this as soon as I can. You might try disabling your various extensions and determine if you can get Xinha Here to work.
November 30th, 2005 at 4:00 pm
hmmm. I lied, I actually had upgraded to 1.5 on a different machine that the one that I was using to post. I just upgraded this machine (which killed off resizeable text areas and tabinta anyway) - but found that xinha here doesn’t install on 1.5 (I’m guessing all you need to do is update the version wrapper - but I couldn’t figure out how to do that myself).
November 30th, 2005 at 4:12 pm
Jonathan,
I see now. Version 1.0 is not compatible with Firefox 1.5. I posted a 1.5 compatible version on my main website but failed to back update this blog entry. I now updated this blog entry. Either download here of visit my main Firefox extension page.
September 10th, 2006 at 5:53 pm
Can u make a version for FX 2.0b2.
October 12th, 2006 at 9:14 am
Oh my goodness this is an awesome extension. Gotta love it.
If you ever need a job, my company will be happy to have you!
April 18th, 2007 at 12:11 am
Thank You
July 5th, 2007 at 8:59 pm
Hello
I am Lucy, I have found your website while searching for some info at Google. Your site has helped me in a big way.
G’night