This Firefox Text Formatting Toolbar works with any textbox (textarea tag) on any website! Support for HTML, BBCode & WikiCode means you can use this with almost every website.
So lets install this first!
Requirement: Works with Firefox Only! So Download Firefox if you don’t have it!
Installation: Click here to install! A pop-up will appear. Select Install Now! (Need Help?)
Using this Extension:
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Right Click on firefox’s top-menu or navigation bar. A menu will pop-up! (see screenshot)
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Select Text Formatting Toolbar to enable this extension. A new toolbar can be seen as in following screenshot.
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Go to any website and click on textbox. The toolbar will automatically works with currently selected textbox.
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[IMP] Select which type of code you want from a small menu on toolbar as shown below. Default is BBCode, change it too HTML if you are on site like Orkut which supports HTML in scraps! (see screenshot)
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Just go on selecting the text in textbox and use toolbar buttons for various effects.
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Point and hold your mouse cursor on any button to see its descriptive name!
Thats It! 🙂
You may need help about which code to use! Here is small list, just for guidance…
BBcode
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All forums phpBB, IPB, vBulletin supports BBCode. Some even allows HTML too! (e.g. Orkut Forum)
HTML
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Orkut (yes Orkut supports HTML)
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Commenting on wordpress, blogger and many other blogs/websites
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“Contact Us” form, specially to highlight your main question
Wiki Code
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Wikipedia. Yes share your knowledge!
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Other open source documentation where some wiki is in use for
Links: Install Now | Extension Mozilla Page | Extension Homepage | Download Firefox
10 Comments
Nice tool!
I’d like to see code customizable code highlight tool so I could configure some colors for textarea of forms I visit most often.
@Johu
Can you please give more details or few example about what you are looking for…
I will try to find out an extension for you then. 🙂
As you know, in every forum there is different CSS so that for would look nice. As I am administrator in several I’d like a tool, which would highlight BB-Code and do something like bracket matching so it would be easier to fallow syntax mistakes. I has to be customizable, so that i could choose colors, what would suit with colors with text area.
I think, it would be convenient if it did nothing by default. If you are in forum and see a textarea, you can rightclick on it and choose ‘code highlight preferences’ or something like that. And next time you visit the same page it already uses same settings u used before.
About coloring system… all code tag’s should be colored different from background and from text and from each other. They should be painted by pairs so that ‘quote’ and ‘/quote’ tags would be in same color but ‘quote’ and ‘quote’ wouldn’t. This way you can match them with ease.
In conclusion i am thinking about something like bracket matching in Exel where ( and ) are painted by pairs. In bb code and html opening and closing tag should be colored (not ” or ‘[]’ but hole tag ‘[code]’)
@johu
I guess you need two more features in this plugin…
1. Syntax highlighting to minimize errors
2. And plugin should automatically detect which coding format to use. Means if its a php forum then textarea should automatically get associated with bbCode format.
Let me know if I am right. If so, then I guess this plugin itself can be enhanced to do both things… 🙂
Two more things? 🙂
Yes, I could use the first thing. But thing is, that there is not much more syntax highlighting needed than tag matching as I tried to describe before. Syntax of BB code is way too easy to call it syntax highlighting.
About your second suggestion: as you can’t make it auto detect all kinds of forums and pages where you can use BB-Code inside a textarea. I think that rightclicking on textarea is best option to configure the plugin for particular textarea (among other things choose between BB-Code, Wiki and HTML which also would be useful). This would also avoid this plugin to mess with textareas which are not meant for format language input.
With ‘Two more things?’ I meant that I told before about same things… more or less
@Johu
So I guess we almost finalize enhancement.
Now first we should contact plugin author for modifications, if we fails to respond or do not have time we can do it ourselves. 🙂
Hi – I tried down loading BB code for FF and it wont load .. when I right click I don’t see the bb code application on the drop down menu …. any one no why .. this was over the last few weeks also …….. any answers please send …
I tried to download not avail in 3.9.2 why????
my site opens okay in explorer but not in firefox. I understand that I must add a firefox html formatting small piece of code at the very top of the page, but where i can get it?
awaiting help
thanks
jorge