Any plans for documentation for plugin developers? (1 Viewer)

[narsor]

Hi all,

I have started a plugin development effort to display RAW images in a grid view for media portal, but could not find documentation about controls and how to use them from code side (dynamicaly creating controls). I can create buttons, can manualy put them in gridcontrol etc, but the same methods do not work for group control.

My main confusion point is that, why an open source in this very good state do not have documentation, only some small additions that can be added by a knowledgable person for a couple of days would suffice, but there are some basic parts missing from developer documentation part ruining the development effort.

I got the core part (RAW->JPG or whatever) on the fly conversion and caching completed in a very short time, and it is a bit sad to get stuck on UI building side since there is not enough documentation on the site.

PS: I also believe that there are misleading information on one of the developer pages, how can I comment on it?

Cheers

 

[surfermc]

I presume that you have taken a look at the wiki page PluginDevelopersGuide.

PS: I also believe that there are misleading information on one of the developer pages, how can I comment on it?

Create yourself an account on the wiki site and make amendments to the pages.

 

[narsor]

Initial plugin developer guide and advanced plugin development pages are actually quite good enough to have you start developing a new plugin.

But let me give you an example, there is a control named GUITumbnailControl, help page for the control only provides list of attributes that you can enter on a skin file. No information about why the control is there (OK, it is obvious that the control is there to display images and directory structure, but is it automaticaly filling content if I point it to a directory? Does it handle user interaction automaticaly? Where do I set to which directory it should start fetching the content from? etc. etc.)
I can start testing by trial and error with small test projects, but it is the least efficient way of handling things, especially knowing that there is at least someone having the knowledge that can fill the help page.

Help page can be structured something like this:
Description:
2-3 sentences describing the reason of having the control, what it is there for.
Attributes:
The list that is already provided on the pages, a single sentence fragment describing not easy to understand methods (OK to leave width field description empty, but what exactly is colordiffuse property is there for? Is it for thumbnail panel background and window background that the control is in, or generated buttons and control background? etc etc.)
Small example to use:
Very simple implementation on how to instantiate the control and have items in it.

If such pages are provided as documentation, I can easily imagine that there will be more plugins implemented for MediaPortal as the process will be much more clear to create a new plugin.

PS: I'll create an account and provide more information about the improvements I found about alreayd provided information, but there are tons more I need to learn by checking the source code under svn I guess.