Seeking A Developer To Create A Firefox Plugin

Goal: we are seeking a Firefox plugin to marry Zotero functionality with an internal (private) website we are creating.

We are a small non-profit organization (http://fer.org) and are building an experimental internal website using freely available TikiWiki groupware software (http://info.tikiwiki.org) that includes a content management system (CMS).

Like many others, we are very impressed with Zotero's ability to collect and organize bibliographic information (and pdfs when available). This is not an attempt to improve on the existing capability of Zotero, including the ability to share information using groups. Rather, we'd like to create a tailored Firefox plugin that is made possible by Zotero. Specifically, we would like to create a means to re-direct information grabbed by Zotero and have it land into our internal site's CMS.

This is going to be an experiment. We cannot prescribe all of the specifications and would hope to work with someone on a contractual basis to develop a functional plugin. Anything that is developed would be made available to others at no cost, and it might open up some new avenues to leverage all of the effort that has gone into developing Zotero thus far. Here are some rough ideas for what it is we want to create:

* ability to click on a button while viewing a website that has a Zotero translator for it (e.g., NY Times, Science Magazine, etc.);
* clicking button then triggers an interface window to pop up (potentially, we could use the split screen design already featured in Zotero);
* the user then would have the ability to enter in a WYSIWYG editor window a few comments about the content on the web page--this content would be eventually saved more-or-less as a note attached to the Zotero record for this web page;
* we're currently sorting out whether to use tags and categories in this internal site, so probably we'd want to have the ability to select tags and/or categories to connect with this Zotero entry;
* by hitting the "submit" button, all of the information already grabbed by Zotero plus the notes entered by the user (and category and tag info) would be directed into an "article" entry on our internal site's CMS (probably we'd also have the info go to the user's personal Zotero database resident on their pc).

Undoubtedly, we'll want to adjust the functionality through several versions of the plugin.

Schedule: we'd like to get moving on this fairly rapidly (next few weeks, would be ideal).

Budget: negotiable, and our preference would be to strike a contract based on an hourly rate and a reasonable estimate of the number of hours anticipated.

Contact: please contact Kent Cavender-Bares (bares@fer.org)
  • Why bother making a new plugin? Why not just use Zotero as is and just write a translator for Zotero to export the data out and into your CMS?
  • Thanks for your comment. We're certainly open to different strategies to accomplish this. Perhaps it would have been better to pose this as a Zotero plugin rather than a Firefox plugin. Above all, our goal is to keep the barrier to participation as low as possible for people using this internal site. Thus, we would prefer to have a "one click" solution, rather than having two or more steps (e.g., pull the information into a personal Zotero database and then select a given library entry (or multiple entries) and export them to our CMS). Does that make sense?
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