Publishing Your Plug-inPublishing your plug-in to the Yahoo! Messenger Plug-in Gallery, located at http://gallery.yahoo.com/messenger, makes it available to all users on the Messenger Network for download. To be published, Yahoo! must approve it based on security and appropriateness guidelines. Publishing your plug-in is an easy process.
For security reasons, ActiveX plug-ins and plug-ins that access the Address Book may take longer to approve. Plug-ins designed for commercial usage will not be accepted through this process; if you have created a commercial plug-in that you wish to publish on Yahoo!, send an email to messenger-plugins@yahoo-inc.com.
Since plug-ins are hosted by Yahoo! Messenger, it's important that they fit well aesthetically and functionally with Yahoo! Messenger. To following recommended UI guidelines will help you to create plug-ins that work well with Messenger. For the most up-to-date information, go to http://gallery.yahoo.com/messenger.
The size of a Tab plug-in in the main window should be relatively compact: less than 100 pixels high. Some plug-ins may be higher, such as a calendar plug-in, but most plug-ins should have a vertical size of less than 100 pixels.
Keep the content of the main plug-in window "fresh", using such features as buttons and active scrolling to keep content up to date. For example, the Amazon plug-in has an auto scroll list of top rated books that the user can switch to top sellers for electronics, and other Amazon categories.
For Tab plug-ins, the main window content should offer instant access to data that is immediately relevant. For instance, if a user is looking at email or working on an excel spreadsheet, a click on Messenger should show data related to the user at that instant: the number of emails they have in Yahoo! Mail, the number of local traffic accidents, bid on eBay items, questions answered on Y! Answers, etc. If the user wants more info at that point, the developer should use a secondary window to present that data and offer the user the ability to drill down on the data.
User or descriptive content in a Tab plug-in, content that needs user attention for more than a couple of seconds, should be displayed in the secondary (sliding) window. For example, in a news plug-in, if a user clicks on a news item, the news summary with a picture could display in the secondary window. The main window should drive access to new content through a set of buttons or explicit action from the user.
Plug-in developers are encouraged to leverage the buddy list. The ability for user plug-ins to communicate with each other is one of the key benefits of developing a Yahoo! Messenger plug-in. For instance, in the Amazon plug-in, you can see a friend's wish list by clicking on the friend in the buddy list.
Before submitting your Yahoo! Messenger Plug-in, review the following guidelines.
To be accepted, submissions should adhere to the following:
In general, a plug-in should have the following attributes:
Submissions may be rejected if they fall exceptionally short of these standards.
Put your plug-in in a structured folder similar to the test.yplugin folder in the SDK Test.zip file. Create a new name for the root directory, such as myGreatIdea.yplugin. For example, the plug-in structure should be, at a minimum:
myGreatIdea.yplugin/MANIFEST/plugin.properties
If your plugin.properties file points to a local HTML file, move the HTML file to myGreatIdea.yplugin/
For instance, if your "Location" key in the manifest file points to mainWindow.html, the key should point to ../mainWindow.html, your plug-in structure should be as follows:
myGreatIdea.yplugin/MANIFEST/plugin.properties
myGreatIdea.yplugin/mainWindow.html
For Tab plug-ins, verify that your plug-in looks great when opened in "full view" mode: make sure that the height and expanded keys in the manifest file are set correctly. The preferred-height key should be set to less than 200 pixels. This is the height of your plug-in when shown below the friend's list in the Messenger window.
To submit your plug-in,
That's it!
Next, we will download your plug-in and have a first look to see if the content is appropriate for our users, and run tests to make sure it behaves correctly. If accepted, we stage it to be signed. Then we update your submission entry with a ymsgr protocol and approve your plug-in.
We will send you an email with the ymsgr URL which you can use to promote your plug-in, typically something like:
ymsgr:GetPlugin?ID=xxxxxxxxx
We're working on putting together some nice pictures and icons you can use to advertize your plug-in on your websites; from there you can use the ymsgr URL which users can click on to automatically download your plug-in from our servers. Yes, it's that cool :-)
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