I am to used to searching everything from Firefox search providers box on the left hand side; I was getting fed up when I type some issue id for my local jira and not getting any results so I decided to develop a search provider for jira quick search and to my surprise it was easier than I expected; hence I put ins some effort in working it out and I want to save effort of people who might be interested in doing same.
We will create an xml file based on following page creating open search plugin for Firefox
<ShortName>Jira</ShortName>
<Description>My Personal Jira</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Image width="16" height="16">My Image URl</Image>
<Url type="text/html" method="post" template="http://vishy:8080/jira/secure/QuickSearch.jspa">
<Param name="searchString" value="{searchTerms}"/>
<Param name="ei" value="UTF-8"/>
</Url>
<SearchForm>http://vishy:8080/jira/secure/QuickSearch.jspa</SearchForm>
</OpenSearchDescription>
Edit the fields in bold according to your setup and save the file in your <Firefox installation directory>\searchplugins\jira.xml
Restart your browser and check the list of search providers; you will see a new search provider with name you specified in tag short name.
The above concept can be extended for searching any other intranet side through Firefox.
Enjoy searching Jira issues; post me back if you have some issue getting it working. 
Filed under: OpenSource, Programming - Trackback Uri