Now that we are living in a Thunderbird 3.0 world, there will be times when we will want to indicate that content on the Mozilla Developer Center applies to a specific Thunderbird release version. (We’ve already been doing this to some degree with Thunderbird 3, but over the next year we will have many more release versions to manage.)

There are two mechanisms for labeling content on the Mozilla Developer Center: tags and templates.

Tags

At the bottom of each MDC page there is a section called “Tags”. These are folksonomy tags that apply to an entire page (for example, “Thunderbird” or “Thunderbird 3″). These are not pre-defined, so you can add a new tag (such as “Thunderbird 3.2″) as needed. However, please check the list of tags that is displayed as you enter letters in the “Tags” field, and try to avoid duplicating existing tags.

The main benefit of tags is that you can list all the pages that have a particular tag  by clicking the hyperlinked tag word. Therefore, don’t be afraid of adding lots of tags, and don’t be afraid of making tags too specific.

Templates

There are four MDC templates that are used to indicate that page (or a section on a page) applies to a specific version:

• {{template.Tb_minversion_header(N)}}: This template should be used when the content of the whole page or section applies to Thunderbird version N or higher.
• {{template.tb_minversion_inline(N)}}: This template should be used when an individual item in a list or a table appeared in Thunderbird version N.
• {{template.Tb_minversion_note(N, “The <code>foobar()</code> method works differently in Thunderbird N.”)}}: This template should be used when you need to insert a Thunderbird version-specific note into an article.
• {{template.Tb_minversion_section(N)}}: This template should be used when the content of a section applies to Thunderbird version N or higher.

So, for example, if you were to paste (as text ) the following into the MDC editor:

{{template.Tb_minversion_header(3.2)}}

{{template.Tb_minversion_section(3.2)}}

{{template.tb_minversion_inline(3.2)}}

{{template.Tb_minversion_note(3.2, "The <code>foobar()</code> method works differently in Thunderbird 3.2.")}}

…you would see this after saving the page:

Another useful template is {{template.draft(”")}}. This generates:

See the Template page on MDC for a complete list of MDC templates.