Brand your Feature and be part of “About Eclipse”

You’re writing plug-ins running inside Eclipse ? Then let the users know that your plug-ins are included.

To check what is installed into your running Eclipse IDE go to menu “About Eclipse” and click on “Installation details” – there you’ll get all about installed Plug-ins, features, etc.

But wait – if you open “About Eclipse” there are some icons visible like this:

Without looking on the Installation details you see some Icons per ex. from Eclipse Modeling Project:

one click and you get informations about the features you installed from Modeling Project:

For each feature you get a description with Icon and even Links pointing directly to the Project sites.

Whats the secret to be visible with your project icon and feature descriptions ?

Feature Branding

Open your feature.xml and you can point to a branding plugin:

The Branding Plug-in normaly is one of the plug-ins from your feature, but you can also use an extra branding-plug-in.

Inside your Branding Plug-in you have to place some informations at the root of your plug-in project:

• about.ini
• nameOfYourFeatureImage

about.ini is a properties file with minimum two entries:

featureImage=nameOfYourFeatureImage
aboutText=your text to be displayed

here’s an example:

the content of the about.ini:

I did this with the redView Features: one plug-in of each Feature works as a branding Plug-in with always the same Feature Image.

Then after installing these features you’ll see it at “About Eclipse”:

If you want to know what else you can do with branding, I recommend the eclipse Plug-ins book from Eric Clayberg and Dan Rubel, which belongs to my most important eclipse books:

I hope you got an idea how to better present your Features and Plug-ins at “About Eclipse”.