The easiest way to get your games to Firefox Marketplace

[IvanK]

Hi guys,

 

so-called Firefox Marketplace is out there for a while, but getting your game into this marketplace is a real pain in the ass (even bigger pain than Chrome Webstore).

 

I made a little PHP script, which generates manifest.webapp file for your app / game. I made it a part of SpreadMyGame.com, so if you submit your game into SMG (title, description, game URL, thumbnail URL ...), you will see a link to your manifest.webapp file (it may look like this), which you can submit right into FF Marketplace Submission form .

 

You would still have to go through a lot of forms, but I think making manifest file (speficifcation) is the hardest part. And once you have all your games at SMG, adding them to FF Marketplace becomes quite "mechanical" work.

 

Hope you will like it

[end3r]

so-called Firefox Marketplace is out there for a while, but getting your game into this marketplace is a real pain in the ass (even bigger pain than Chrome Webstore).

Can you elaborate on that? What exactly were the problems you had?

I think it's the easiest submit process there is. It's just about a few basic info in the manifest file and the same in the submit form - I described that in detail in the Preparing for Firefox OS article and a few talks I gave.

This is the simplest manifest file:

 

{  "name": "My App",  "description": "My description goes here",  "launch_path": "/",  "icons": {    "128": "/img/icon-128.png"  },  "developer": {    "name": "Your name or organization",    "url": "http://your-homepage-here.org"  },  "default_locale": "en"}

 

Everything is self explanatory. And "a lot of forms" is mostly adding screenshots and description.

But the more helpers to get your games there the better ;]

[IvanK]

I think there are several unexpected and confusing obstacles:

• manifest path, launch_path, icon path, what should be relative to what, what should be on the same domain and what does not have to
• specific file strucure, authors may have to restructue files on their server just because of FF Marketplace
• application/x-web-app-manifest+json header of manifest file - one usually has to use server-side programming to edit headers. I have no server-side code and adding .htaccess entry and PHP files for each of my games is just crazy. Too bad if you don't know any server-side programming.
• when you have 15 games, creating and validating 15 manifest files by hand is crazy too

 

I have discussed these things in dozens of emails with Firefox team. And all these problems are sovled for you by SMG service

[end3r]

It's something you can find in the MDN documentation, some other things are not even mandatory, but yeah, sometimes it might be confusing. As I said - it's good to see services that help you get the games in the Marketplace as Firefox OS is something I believe in ;]