Writing QGIS plugins
One of the main reasons of the popularity of QGIS is its extensibility. Using the basic tools and features provided by the QGIS API, new functionality can be implemented and added as a new plugin that can be shared by contributing it to the QGIS plugins repository.
Getting ready
To be able to develop a new QGIS plugin, you should be familiar with the Python programming language. If the plugin has a graphical interface, you should have some knowledge of the Qt framework, as this is used for all UI elements, such as dialogs. To access the QGIS functionality, it is required that you know the QGIS API.
A very handy resource for all these (plus a few others) is the GeoAPIs website, which is created by SourcePole at http://geoapis.sourcepole.com/.
To simplify the creation of a plugin, we will use an additional plugin named Plugin Builder. It should be installed in your QGIS application.
How to do it…
The following steps create a new plugin that will print out detailed information...
