SillyDog701

[DJGM]

Michael Kaply Revives CCK Project
Tuesday April 26th, 2005

Yesterday, IBM Mozilla developer Michael Kaply posted a newsgroup message to gauge interest
in an effort to revive the Client Customization Kit (CCK). After receiving over thirty replies to
his CCK proposal, Mike has created a CCK wiki page to get the project off the ground.

The CCK project aims to make it easy for organisations to customise Mozilla products
to meet their needs. This includes setting certain default options, locking some
preferences so they can't be changed and configuring the user interface.

Also . . .

Mike plans to concentrate on Mozilla Firefox at first but it is likely that Mozilla Thunderbird and
the community-driven continuation of the Mozilla Application Suite will also be supported.

All in all, this sounds like excellent news, and it might just enable me to resume my customised browser distros
like I did with the old Netscape CCK program to create customised builds of the Netscape 7.x internet suite.

If this new CCK project for customised Mozilla based browsers get going, and something usuable is eventually
developed, there are some of things I hope that will happen, including things that Netscape should've done:

Cross platform - Hopefully, the CCK for Mozilla won't be restricted to Windows only, like the NSCCK was.
As well as making builds for Windows users, I'd like to be able to create builds for Mac and Linux users also.

Ease of use - The NSCCK was quite easy to use. Even non-advanced users could roll their own browser
without the need to download the source code and compile builds from that. I hope that any Mozilla CCK
that is released is just as easy to use the NSCCK was, complete with a similar wizard based interface.

CONFIG.INI - I also hope that after running the CCK, the files it creates should include a CONFIG.INI
file that I can edit in any standard text editor such as NotePad on Windows, or TextEdit on Mac OS X.
This file enabled me to include additional customisations, such as editing some of the options that
are offered in the installer that the user downloads to his or her computer.


All being well, what was the main section of the (now defunct) "Club Netscape" website I used to run, will
soon become part of a newly revitalised DJGM.co.uk, since I've left it without any useful features for ages!

Full article at MozillaZine.org.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b) Gecko/20050205

[Andrew T.]

This is great news. It will be good if a tool is made available to create and distribute customized Mozilla browser installations once again.

For more information, I would recommend checking the new CCK page on the Mozilla Wiki. Hopefully, this effort won't get stalled as previous Mozilla CCK attempts were.

According to the CCK wiki, here are some of the capabilities for customization a CCK for Mozilla Firefox might implement:

# Company name at the end in the titlebar
# Company identifier added to the user agent
# Change Activity Indicator URL
# Change Activity Indicator tooltip
# Change Activity indicator image
# Add one item to the help menu
# New default homepage
# New default start page (first page before homepage)
# Add items to the personal toolbar (including live bookmarks)
# Remove items from the personal toolbar
# Add a single custom bookmark or a custom folder with up to five items (including live bookmarks)
# Remove bookmarks
# Default proxy configuration
# Add additional search engine
# Change update URL
# Change plugin URL
# Add sites to default "don't block popups" list
# Add sites to default "allow to install software" list
# Customize the toolbar (add/remove)
# Add/Remove/Hide menubar items, context menu items
# Disable downloads
# Disable about:config
# add about:plugins back?

Of course, as of now the project is only in its planning stages. It will be interesting to follow it as it progresses in the future, though.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win95; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3

[Don_HH2K]

It sounds like this could be good and nothing else!

I may still go about making my builds by hand, though. Why, do I like breaking my back on a daily basis? Unless they make the Mozilla CCK app completely customizable -- that is, you can customize every single app and pref from within it, doing it by hand will probably allow me to do more. It would be interesting, though, to see editors that allow you to do more than just brand the browser. What I'd like to see is the ability to stick other stuff in there too -- plugins, XUL applications, and perhaps some UI-enabled JS editors for everything. Then I'd definitely buy into something like that.

It would be good as well if I could create installers for Mac, Linux, and Windows (the three major OSes) from one platform, whether that platform be Windows, Mac, or Linux. Then I wouldn't have to break my back over the excrutiatingly slow PearPC and the not-so-better VMWare.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Donzilla/0.7PR1 (like Mozilla/1.7.7; wml/1.3)

[DJGM]

. . . I may still go about making my builds by hand, though. Why, do I like breaking my
back on a daily basis? Unless they make the Mozilla CCK app completely customizable --
that is, you can customize every single app and pref from within it, doing it by
hand will probably allow me to do more . . .

On all the occasions I built my own custom builds of Netscape 7.x using the CCK, I think I spent
many more hours tweaking things within CONFIG.INI, and other stuff, such as making minor
edits to certain files in order (for example) to place a link in the Help menu back to SD701.

Not to mention other various "post production" things like adding custom artwork such as new
splashscreens and/or installer icons, plus the inclusion of a few selected Mozilla XPI add-ons.

Essentially, the results of the inital NSCCK job only gave me basis to work on. I wasn't always
entirely satisfied with the job until I'd added my own additonal tweaks and finishing touches.

I hope that, when a useable and fully functional Mozilla CCK is eventually released (sometime
in the not too distant future) that it's methods and workings, don't differ too much from what
was previously offered by the CCK for Ns7.x. The only BIG difference I ask for, is one thing
that the NSCCK never offered. Complete cross platform compatibility, so I could at least
have a go at making CCK'd Mozilla's for Mac and Linux users, not just Windows users!

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b) Gecko/20050205

[Antony]

Looking forward to see new DJGM-Distros

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/412