What is zotero-plugin-dev?

A development guide for building and packaging Zotero desktop plugins, which are add-ons for Zotero, a research and reference-management application. It covers Zotero versions 7 through 10, their extension structure, APIs, lifecycle, and packaging.

Use it to build, port, debug, and package Zotero extensions, including their manifest, startup and shutdown behavior, user-interface hooks, preferences, item views, and reader events.

It helps developers handle version differences and correctly clean up menus, event listeners, windows, and other resources when a plugin is disabled or upgraded.

zotero-plugin-dev — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by cboulanger

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add cboulanger/zotero-skills --skill zotero-plugin-dev

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cboulanger/zotero-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Its marketplace also offers this one on its own, as the plugin zotero-skills — /plugin install zotero-skills after adding the marketplace above.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cboulanger/zotero-skills/zotero-plugin-dev/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/cboulanger/zotero-skills/zotero-plugin-dev)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cboulanger/zotero-skills/zotero-plugin-dev"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cboulanger/zotero-skills/zotero-plugin-dev/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cboulanger/zotero-skills/zotero-plugin-dev"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cboulanger/zotero-skills/zotero-plugin-dev.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 235 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 3,312 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00235	$0.03312
Opus 5.5	$0.00094	$0.01325
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00047	$0.00662
Haiku 4.5	$0.00023	$0.00331

Measured 7d ago against content hash a16e8089104a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-01, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

zotero-plugin-dev scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 4 executable files (assets/minimal-plugin/bootstrap.js, assets/minimal-plugin/my-plugin.js, assets/minimal-plugin/prefs.js, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/zotero-plugin-dev/SKILL.md · 228 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 228 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Zotero plugin development

Zotero plugins are privileged, bootstrapped Mozilla add-ons: they run with full chrome access (XPCOM, file system, the whole Zotero object) and can be enabled, disabled and upgraded without a restart. That combination is where most bugs come from — a plugin that works on first install but leaks UI, listeners or memory when it is disabled, upgraded or when the main window is reopened. Much of this skill is about keeping startup and teardown symmetrical.

Model knowledge of Zotero plugins is often stale (Zotero 6 overlays, install.rdf, chrome.manifest, Services.jsm imports, Bluebird, single-collection selection). Trust this skill and the official "Zotero N for Developers" pages over recall.

0. Establish the target first

Before writing code, pin down:

Zotero versions to support. Current stable is 10 (Firefox 140 ESR base, same as 9). Zotero 8 moved to Firefox 140 and ESM-only; Zotero 10 changed selection, search, full-text and local-API behavior. Read references/version-changes.md whenever the plugin must run on more than one major version or is being ported.
Scaffold. Two sensible paths:
- Plain JS, no build step — copy assets/minimal-plugin/ (modeled on the official Make It Red 2.0 sample). Best for small plugins, bridges, or when the user wants to understand every line.
- TypeScript + hot reload — windingwind's zotero-plugin-template with zotero-plugin-scaffold, zotero-plugin-toolkit and zotero-types. Best for anything with real UI or ongoing development. See references/template-workflow.md. If the user already has a repo, follow its structure; don't migrate scaffolds unasked.
Plugin ID (name@domain), a short namespace prefix (used for element IDs, Fluent IDs, pref keys, CSS classes), and the pref branch (extensions.<namespace>.* or extensions.zotero.<namespace>.*).

1. Anatomy

my-plugin/
├── manifest.json      # WebExtension-style metadata; applications.zotero is mandatory
├── bootstrap.js       # lifecycle + window hooks
├── prefs.js           # default prefs, plugin root (NOT defaults/preferences/)
├── my-plugin.js       # main code, loaded via Services.scriptloader.loadSubScript
├── preferences.xhtml  # optional pref-pane fragment (no DOCTYPE, XUL default ns)
├── style.css
└── locale/en-US/my-plugin.ftl   # Fluent; auto-registered, no chrome.manifest needed

Read the full file on GitHub · 228 lines

Files

What ships with it

15 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

7d ago First seen · 228 lines · 235 tokens per session scan A a16e8089104a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

zotero-plugin-dev is a skill published in the GitHub repository cboulanger/zotero-skills (3 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed CC0-1.0. It adds 235 tokens to every session and 3,312 once invoked, about $0.0009 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-24.

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