[Qgis-developer] PostGIS plugins menu

[Martin Dobias]

Hi Borys

On Sun, Aug 15, 2010 at 11:59 AM, Borys Jurgiel <borysiasty at aster.pl> wrote:
> My suggestion for now is to put everything to a PostGIS submenu within the
> Plugins menu:
>
> self.iface.addPluginToMenu('PostGIS', actionBlahBlah)

Right. I will do that for postgis manager in the next release.


> Then we can modify the QgsInterface.addPluginToMenu method to put each
> submenu either to the Plugins branch or to the main menu, so each user can
> configure which plugin sumbenus are at hand. It's a five-minuts-fix to read
> it from QSettings (still without any GUI for configuring it, but it's a step
> forward).
>
> The third step is the GUI. I started refactoring the Installer (just three
> hours per month, so it's why no changes are commited) and with Martin and
> Anne we plan to put it as a second tab of the manager. What about a third
> tab "menus and toolbars", when an user can be able to:
>
> 1. Select whether given submenu (e.g. PostGIS) goes to the main menu or the
> Plugins menu
>
> 2. Select whether given submenu creates its own toolbar or goes to the main
> Plugin toolbar.
>
> 3. Compose own toolbar(s) with a set of individual plugin buttons. It allows
> to hide the native plugin toolbar and enable personalized ones, like
> "Monday's tasks", "Tools useful for X-files processing etc"
>
> 4. Save/load profiles (at least sets of plugins to be loaded - now I often
> have to use --noplugins option to make qgis faster)
>
> What do you think? The first two steps can be done in a moment.

I like this idea of giving the users a chance to override the default
placement. I would like to go even further - to allow user to
manipulate individual actions created by the plugins - but that would
probably need an addition to interface API (otherwise the
identification of actions would depend on their name in current
translation). I think of showing a tree widget to the user where nodes
would be menus and submenus, the leafs would be individual actions.
The user would be able to modify the tree in any way he likes: add new
top level menus with some actions or just reorganize the 'Plugins'
menu.

If we end up updating the plugin interface, we could also proceed with
defining the categories as we have discussed at the hackfests. Each
plugin would be _strongly_ advised to suggest a category where it
belongs, so ideally the users will not have to organize the plugins
manually.

Bye
Martin