focalboard/experiments/webext

Focalboard Web Clipper Browser Extension ✂️

This is the Focalboard Web Clipper browser extension. It aims at supporting various use cases around converting web content from your browser directly into Focalboard cards.

⚠️ Warning: The extension is currently in an early and experimental state. Use it at your own risk only. Don't expect any eye candy.

Status

The extension currently is in a proof-of-concept state with minimal functionality. The only supported use case at the time is building a read-later list. Things that work:

• Logging in to the Focalboard server from the extension settings
• Selecting a board to capture cards into from the extension settings
• Saving websites (title & URL) into cards from a page action (like e.g. Pocket does it)

Only Firefox was tested so far but polyfills have already been enabled so there's a good chance that it'll work in Chrome and maybe even Safari, too.

Next Steps

We're really at the very beginning here so there's a lot to be done. Notable tasks include:

• Improve the React code by extracting components
• Style the options and popup pages to mimic the look and feel of Focalboard
• Replace the logo with something better (the current one was snatched from the Focalboard Windows app)
• Link to the extension's options page from page action error messages
• Clip parts of a website into image attachments on cards
• Extract website content in reader mode into card descriptions
• Optimise the logic for finding the first URL property (currently the whole board subtree has to be requested because there is no other API available)
• Add some tests
• Test the extension on Chrome / Safari and add infrastructure to facilitate this in future (e.g. .web-ext-config.js)
• Add an onboarding (displayed after first install) and upboarding (displayed after update) page
• Distribute the extension via the various browser add-on stores (ok, maybe too early 😜)

Hacking

First, install dependencies with

$ npm i

You can then compile and bundle the code with

$ npm run watchdev

This will write output into dist/dev/ and automatically recompile and bundle on any source change.

To run the extension in a separate Firefox instance, use

$ npm run servedev

Note that in the above commands you can substitue dev with prod to build and run the extension with production settings.

Distribution

To build a distributable ZIP archive, run

$ npm run build

The archive will be placed into the web-ext-artifacts folder.