One great thing about Mozilla is that we want people to have a voice. Our products give people a voice on the web without being spied on. As a Mozillian, you don’t have to go through various levels of red tape before you are allowed to speak out in public.

As Mozilla grows, it becomes more difficult to stay in touch with what people are saying. Mozilla is many voices, but there is also a lot of noise on the web and others scream loudly about what they do, too. We can help each other being heard by speaking together and tell other people about what we do. We’re not really playing to our strengths when the people in Mozilla who communicate to the outside world hear about great work by Mozillians by chance or from other sources.

This is why we wanted to make it easier for you to tell us when you created something interesting. That’s why Luke Crouch (@groovecoder) of the Mozilla Devengage team extended the functionality of the “Promote MDN” WordPress plugin.

Originally, this plugin was meant to promote MDN by automatically linking certain words in your posts to the correct Wiki pages. We talked about it before here.. Now we added an extra feature: when you write a post, you get a checkbox in the editing screen that says “Notify Mozilla of this post”:

When checked, publishing the post will automatically send an email to the Mozilla developer engagement team and the Mozilla communications team about your post. That way we can visit your blog, check what you wrote and give you the promotion your work deserves. This could mean tweeting about your article, creating a follow-up post on the Hacks blog, or whatever seems appropriate to the situation.

The Promote MDN plugin still does what it was supposed to do when we originally released it: it links various expressions in your text to MDN for people to read up. These expressions are maintained on the Mozilla Wiki (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Template:Promote-MDN?raw=1) and you have many customisation options allowing you even to fully opt out of this feature:

You can become a trusted expert simply by telling us when you post. We can help get your message much further and you could become a go-to person for us when we need an expert on a particular topics. None of this is mandatory, we just want you to know the opportunity is there to take advantage of.

Get the Promote MDN WordPress Plugin here. If you are interested in modifying the plugin for your own company needs, Luke also made the source code available on GitHub.