Let the fun continue as we keep poking at QGIS.
So the other day I was “chatting online” with a fellow colleague and he had mentioned he needed testers for his QGIS plugin. First thing out of my mouth was “no I don’t have a windows 8 machine” and the second was “Did you hear the API changed?”. I think he said “Oh God” and that made me Think of Nathan’s post – “OH GOD MY PLUGINS”.
Plugins are one of the cool parts of QGIS. If you have an itch – you can write a plugin to scratch it. Depending on how you look at it you had about three different menus in QGIS 1.8 dealing with plugins. One at Settings -> options where you had a whole pile of things you could set and two more menus  under the plugin menu. You could fetch plugins (menu)  and install new plugins and turn them off and on with the plugin manager (menu). It made teaching a bit of a pain because anytime a student had to click in more than 1 spot you would end up losing some of them. “Why
1.8 Plugin Manager
I spoke about labeling yesterday and the new menus you had there – well the three spots for plugins in 1.8 have been replaced with 1 menu in 2.0.1
So everything is now in one menu instead of being spread everywhere. You can now search by tag, author, description, etc – turn things off and on – it’s just a lot easier and better looking at this point. I would say “sexy” – but I’m pretty sure that has never been used up here.
The only downside – and it’s not much of one – the API (Application Programming Interface) changed for plugins so the authors are rewriting them and getting them pushed back into the repository. So all the stuff you love may not be there – but it won’t take long if it’s not…..unfortunately there will be some cases where a plugin has been abandoned and someone needs to step up and rescue it.
So plugins – amother great example of the cool things that are happening in 2.0.1
