Notable changes are:

• Migrating from CakePHP to Django
• Moving from SVN to Git
• Continuous integration
• Faster deployment
• Processing data offline
• Improved documentation

Take a look, it’s a good overview of the technical challenges of managing a large and complex website at an enormous scale.

To summarize the issue, for no apparent reason in right-to-left languages a really long scrollbar would appear at the bottom of the window.

Even though there was a scrollbar, when you scrolled all the way to the left, nothing was there. Another reason this was odd was the scrollbar only appeared in right-to-left (RTL) languages. Inspecting the page via Firebug didn’t give any clues as to what was causing the issue as there was no element hidden somewhere onscreen. Finally, to make things even weirder, the scrollbar only appeared when JavaScript was turned on.

After some thought, I had a feeling that we might be using absolute positioning to position an element to the left and above the page offscreen, which is quite common. In a RTL page, however, left is does not move an element outside a page’s boundaries. So the result is you get a scrollbar.

So what’s a web developer to do? Firebug to the rescue! I popped it open and started typing some JavaScript into the console to find an element that seemed really far offscreen:

var nodes = document.getElementsByTagName("*");

for(var i=0; i < nodes.length;i++) {
    var node = nodes[i];
    if(node.offsetLeft < -500) {
        console.log(node);
    }
}

And Firebug’s console spit out:

<ul id="cat-list">

Ah-ha! Now I was getting somewhere. A quick search through our CSS files for ‘#cat-list’ found an interesting line of code:

#categories.collapsed #cat-list {
    position: absolute;
    left: -999em;
    top: -999em;
}

And when JavaScript is turned on, the class ‘collapsed’ is added to the parent node #categories. In RTL mode this creates a huge scrollbar because -999em to the left of the page is a valid location that a user can scroll to. The solution?

.html-rtl #categories.collapsed #cat-list {
    position: absolute;
    left: 999em;
    top: -999em;
}

On any pages that are RTL, we add the class ‘html-rtl’ to the body tag in order to change the layout for RTL languages. This fixes the issue by moving the category list offscreen to the right, which is outside the page in RTL mode.

Things to remember:

• Firebug is your friend
• The DOM is a live document you can inspect, utilize this feature
• Be careful with positioning with sites that are LTR and RTL

Thanks for your help!

Please let us know if you see any regressions or anything you’d like to see changed.

The next update is scheduled for May 29th and will be mainly a bug fix release with minor new features (like bug 432669). There are currently 28 bugs scheduled for the 3.4.3 push.

We’ll be committing the last of the patches very shortly and the changes will be available on preview.addons.mozilla.org. Feel free to look at the changes and send us any feedback you have. We expect to push the changes live this Thursday evening (May 1st).

Our next release, 3.4.2, is currently scheduled for May 15th. 3.4.2 will also be a bug-fix release – there are currently 19 candidates.

Our next release will be AMO 3.4.1, the first of three dot releases for AMO 3.4, which is our next milestone to be completed before Firefox 3.

All week, all the time:

On the developers page, you will see how many non-mozilla contributors have helped us update translations.  Overall, some rough stats:

• 3134 changes
• 288602 lines affected
• 24 contributors

Again, thanks a ton for your help!

In the same time period we’ve also:

• Upgraded CakePHP’s core software from 1.18.x to 1.19.x
• Added support for weighted database slaves
• Migrated AMO to PHP5 off of the now end-of-life’d PHP4
• Replaced Scriptaculous/Prototype with jQuery
• Improved IE6/IE7 compatibility
• Improved accessibility features

And really, when it comes to sexy, the real magic starts with our volunteers.  Our editors have worked hard to review new and updated add-ons as we move towards Firefox 3 this year and our localizers translated roughly 200 new strings in AMO templates in a little over three weeks for 24 locales (wow).

Thanks to everyone for pitching in to make this release happen.