QGIS plugins reorganisation

15.12.2011 10:41 ·  GIS  ·  qgis, plugins

I am not going to discover America by saying that the number of different plugins for QGIS is constantly growing (190 at the time of writing) and it is difficult to navigate the “Plugins” menu with a dozen or two active plugins. This issue has been raised many times at hackfests, starting with the Vienna meeting, and on the mailing lists.

Periodically, new tickets were filled: #1602, #1734, #4069. One of the results was moving fTools to the “Vector” menu (the menu is created by the module itself), soon the “native” “Raster” menu was added, and a bit later — the “Database” menu (it appears when the first plugin belonging to this menu is activated). But the vast majority of plugins, including core plugins, continued to huddle together in the “Plugins” menu and place their buttons on the corresponding toolbar.

Meanwhile, in ticket #4395, Paolo again raised the question of moving at least the core plugins into the appropriate menus. This is where it all started.

Firstly, the Offline Editing and SPIT plugins have been moved to the “Database” menu. The “Oracle GeoRaster” and “SQLAnywhere” plugins lost their menu items altogether, and their buttons were moved to the “Layers” toolbar and duplicated in the “Layers” menu. After a brief discussion with Paolo, the “repression” continued:

• raster plugins have been moved to the “Raster” menu and toolbar
• a “native” “Vector” menu and toolbar have been created for plugins that work with vector data. fTools and a few other core plugins have been moved there
• the “Add Delimited Text Layer” plugin has been moved to the “Layers” toolbar
• the “GPS Tools” have been split: one button has been moved to the “Layers” toolbar and the other to the “Vector” menu
• the “Database” toolbar has been created, and the “Offline Editing” and “SPIT” plugin buttons have been moved there
• new methods have been added to allow plugin developers to place their plugins in the desired location

Some plugins have not been moved anywhere yet:

• eVis (“Database”?)
• OpenStreetMap (a new category “Web” is proposed)
• MapServer Export (a new category “Web” is proposed)
• RoadGraph (probably “Vector”)
• GRASS
• Coordinate Capture
• Diagram Overlay

So far, all this exists as a reorganise-plugins branch in my fork. The question of merging it has been raised on the mailing list. The main disadvantage (relative in my opinion) - when activating the plugin, the user will not know where exactly, in which of the 4 menus it (the plugin) will appear. One solution is to add a tag to the plugin’s metadata that specifies which section the plugin will be placed in after installation.