Archive:HOW-TO:Write plugins for XBMC

XBMC features a Python Engine and XBMC GUI interface have built-in 'Add-on' support for displaying content listings that present to that GUI interface.

Plugins, unlike scripts, do not really provide new functionality to XBMC, instead what they do do is provide an easy way to present content listings in XBMC through the native GUI interface. Content is usually online sources like Internet audio and video streams, (like Internet TV-channels, and radio-station, or Podcasts), or pictures from websites which as Flickr and Picasa Web.

Please feel free to add more samples of simple plugin functions with comments that you know or figure out while you are learning to write or edit plugins for XBMC. Adding anything at all no matter how basic, if its not already here add it! someone will more then likely benefit from it. The more difficult your snippet please heavily comment it with "#" don't be stingy on the comments you can never have too much information, what's simple to you may make no sense at all to someone else, also URLs that were helpful to what you were doing would be great to add to your snippet or to the bookmark section (python sites, chat rooms, etc).

This a placeholder that so far is just a copy of the beginning of HOW-TO write Python Scripts.

For end-user intruction on how to install pligins for XBMC please see HOW-TO install and use plugins in XBMC.

Note! As most plugins work by scraping a website they often stop working (partially or completely) when changes (redesign) are made to the website by the website owner. So if a third-party plugin do not work know that it is not usually do to a problem with XBMC but rather the website it scrapes have had changes done to it, meaning someone will have to manually edit the plugin code to account for the new changes, then you will have to get that updated version of the plugin.

Writing plugins in python for XBMC

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