FireBugger

I've been doing some local customizations to Plone Google Maps for one of my clients. Google Maps are heavy on Javascript, to say the least, and the work I'm doing requires a lot of client-side debugging. It's been a breeze in Firefox, mostly due to the excellent Firebug extension - but squishing bugs in Internet Explorer has been painful.

So, I've struggled with alert() box debugging in IE for the first 80% of the project. I hit my limit last night, put the work on hold, and set out on a quest to find something like Firebug that would work in IE. I was pleased (and a bit dismayed) to find that what I needed had been right there all along: FireBug Lite. It's a Javascript file that you include in your pages that provides a slightly less powerful, but still very useful, version of Firebug's Javascript console in your browser window. It's exactly what I've been looking for!

I've been wanting to learn about GenericSetup, so I decided to kill two birds with one stone by building a GS-based Plone product to install Firebug Lite into a Plone site. The culmination of that is FireBugger.

That link probably won't work for a few days, until the Plone admins can get around to approving the project, but I've checked a production-ready version into the collective SVN repository. You can check it out from:

http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/FireBugger/trunk

Grab it, and let me know what you think!

Working with GenericSetup was a breeze - all of those crufty install methods are just gone. The only actual code I had to write was the template and script for saving FireBugger options in the site, and a short uninstall method to clean up some things that GenericSetup seems to miss (configlets, site properties, and skin layers).

I wish I had looked into GenericSetup sooner - it would have saved a lot of time on some of my recent work. But at least I can make up some of that time with the time I'll save debugging IE Javascript with FireBugger. :)