HOWTO write a firefox plugin

I'm in the process of writing my first firefox plugin and have recorded my experiences here. The HOWTOs and links I used were:

• http://www.rietta.com/firefox/Tutorial/overview.html
  
• Chrome spec
  
• I found this hilarious:

  xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"

  
  
• Good links from this blog
  
• HOWTO set up a development environment
  
• How to debug extensions, and some essential development extensions
  
• XUL Tutorials
  
• More XUL Tutorials
  
• Adding XUL elements (e.g. menus) dynamically
  
• XUL Reference
  
• Working with the tabbed browser
  
• Storing session information per tab
  
• Firefox extension preferences
  
• XMLHttpRequest
  
• Parsing XML
  
• Publishing the extension on addons.mozilla.org
  

The most important firefox extensions are:

• Console2
  
• Extension developer's extension. The 'reload all chrome' is useful for stuff that is otherwise cached.
  

To create the xpi file for publishing you need to change your chrome.manifest to point to the jar file (I keep another chrome.manifest for packaging in the repository so I can just copy it over). The ordinary manifest looks like this:

content     myextensionname      chrome/content/
skin        myextensionname      classic                 chrome/skin/
overlay     chrome://browser/content/browser.xul    chrome://myextensionname/content/browser_overlay.xul
locale      myextensionname      en                      chrome/locale/en/myextensionname/

and the packaging one looks like this:

content     myextensionname      jar:chrome/myextensionname.jar!/content/
skin        myextensionname      classic                 jar:chrome/myextensionname.jar!/skin/
overlay     chrome://browser/content/browser.xul    chrome://myextensionname/content/browser_overlay.xul
locale      myextensionname      en                      jar:chrome/myextensionname.jar!/locale/en/myextensionname/

I use these commands to create the jar and xpi:

cd chrome
zip -r myext.jar * -x \*.svn\*
cd ..
zip myext.xpi install.rdf chrome.manifest chrome/myext.jar