Notes for Developers
There are several areas of interest for programmers and web developers.
Citations Styles
Styles define the appearance of bibliographies and footnotes. A small selection of the most common styles is installed with Zotero, but there is a much larger repository of downloadable styles developed by the Zotero community.
Many citation styles are minor tweaks of existing publication style guides for particular publications or contexts, and creating new styles in this way is relatively simple.
Zoterifying a Website or Search Engine
There are in fact two different ways to go about this: writing a translator (a small Javascript script that will be stored in Zotero files) or embedding metadata in webpages’ HTML. Zotero recommends doing the latter if you can; translators work in a fairly crude way by scraping data off webpages, which can be liable to break if the structure of the webpage changes.
Translators can also be written for other functions, however, including exporting data in specific formats.
The Zotero API
API [zotero] (read/write API).
The most obvious implementation of the API is the Libraries at the Zotero website itself.
It’s also being used in interesting ways by a number of projects.