Here’s a short but sweet one. If you’re daunted by the task of creating OpenSearch plug-ins for your site or any of your favourite sites, fear no more. OpenSearchFox is a cool new Firefox extension that can create such plug-ins for you with a single click.
Is it really that simple?
Absolutely so. All you need to do is install the extension and then browse to the site you want to create the search plug-in for. Once you’re at the site, locate the Search Box and right-click on it. You’ll notice a new item named “Add OpenSearch plugin” in your menu. The item is accompanied by a blue magnifying glass icon to help you easily spot it. Just click on that and you’re done.
Only intermediary step involves a single dialog box which asks you to name the plugin whatever you feel like. The plug-in is created and added to your search engine list directly along with the fav-icon for the site. If the site lacks a fav-icon, you can always use one of your own through the same dialog box where you name the plugin.
Give it a try and see for yourself…
Those who still want to learn the inner workings of OpenSearch plug-ins and create one programmatically, here are a couple of resources for you:
Following the tutorial(s) I posted on creating OpenSearch plug-ins for Firefox that can search Invision Power Board based forums & WordPress blogs, I received quite a few requests for help in creating such plug-ins for a wide variety of blogs/CMS/sites.
To make the job easier for all of you, I decided to create a couple of sample plug-ins, which I’ll list here as zip files. The…
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In my earlier tutorial titled Creating OpenSearch Plugins for Firefox (adds to the QuickSearch bar) I taught you how to write a basic OpenSearch XML format plug-in that can be used with both Firefox 2.x and IE7. The demonstrated example consisted of creating a plug-in that searches through Invision Power Boards.
As an afterthought, I felt like coming up with another quick tutorial on creating the…
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A brief introduction
This tutorial will attempt to explain in a simple manner how to create an OpenSearch plug-in for Firefox. These plug-ins appear in a drop-down menu in the Firefox Quick-Search bar (located right of the URL/Address bar) and help you perform quick searches across various search engines without having to visit the search page first. Pretty neat, eh?
These search plug-ins were in existence (for…
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