Using the Mozilla Developer Center

Welcome to the Mozilla Developer Center! Here you'll find documentation for not only working on the code and other components of the Mozilla project, but also for developing add-ons for Mozilla-based software, creating new software based on Mozilla code, and web development for the open Web.

The most important thing to note about the Mozilla Developer Center is that it is a community-driven documentation project. If you see an error, or find that there's some content missing, you can contribute the correction yourself! Simply create a new account on the wiki and then click the "Edit page" link near the top of the page that needs work.

Worried that your writing skills aren't up to snuff? Don't be! Happy, helpful documentation gnomes constantly monitor the site, looking for grammatical and other errors, and will clean up after you if your English grammar skills aren't as good as your wicked coding skills.

The rest of this article provides helpful information about using the MDC web site.

Finding what you need

There are several ways you can find the information you need. First off, you can start at the main page, and follow the menu links to narrow your way down toward the article that will help you the most.

You can also search the site by entering search terms in the search box near the top-right corner of the page. One helpful tip here: because MDC uses Lucene to power its search, you can use powerful Lucene queries when searching MDC.

For example, to limit your search only to article titles, you can do something like:

title:"extension"

This will return only articles with the word "extension" in their titles.

You can also perform proximity searches. For example, to find articles in which the words "video" and "ogg" are used within 10 words of each other, you can do this:

"video ogg"-10

For more information about Lucene search syntax, check out the Lucene parser query syntax documentation.

Also, if you're an expert at Mozilla concepts, there's a special page that provides direct links to specific topic areas. This can reduce the amount of drilling down through menus you need to do.

Editing content

MDC uses a what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) editor to edit its content. See the MDC editor guide for details.

See also

Document Tags and Contributors

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 Last updated by: fscholz,