Tuesday-patchday

20.12.2011 19:39 ·  GIS  ·  qgis, plugins

A follow-up to the QGIS plugins reogranisation post.

In general, the proposed changes were well received and sparked another wave of discussion about the plugin situation. At the same time, the main drawback of the proposed approach was pointed out — now, after activating a plugin, it is not known in which menu it will appear. To solve this problem, the Plugin Manager had to be modified, and another tag had to be added to the plugin metadata.

The new category metadata is for informational purposes only and should contain the name of the menu where the plugin will be placed after activation. This information is displayed in the Plugin Manager.

If there is no category metadata, the default value “Plugins” is used.

Oh, and one more thing. Plugins written in C++ need to be recompiled. It is a small API break.

It is still the responsibility of the plugin developer to place the plugin in the correct menu, and there are many API calls available for this purpose. These methods can be used to add the plugin to any menu or toolbar.

What’s this all about? Well, about 20 minutes ago, it stopped being an experimental branch and was merged into master. So if you don’t find “Add Delimited Text Layer” in the “Plugins” toolbar tomorrow, don’t say you weren’t warned :-).