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I wish to develop a simple plugin for QGIS, which will open some data, and some specific processing.

I have quite a it of development experience with ESRI's Arcojects, but haven't developed with QGIS before.

I tried searching on the QGIS wiki, but only found this link :

http://www.qgis.org/wiki/Writing_C++_Plugins

which seems to be obsolete. There were also a few blog posts from 2006.

I also saw something about Python plugins, but I am not sure whether I need to work with the C++ plugin or a Python plugin.

Can Anyone guide me to the documentation, or tutorials that would help me get started

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Also subscribe to the user/dev list and send emails there if you have any questions – dassouki Oct 20 '11 at 18:24

3 Answers

up vote 18 down vote accepted

C++ plugins are less and less common these days. Most likely because they are more difficult to develop. Most documentation effort has been put into Python plugins. C++ still has it's place for performance critical things and functionality that is supposed to be merged into QGIS core (like new renderers for example).

This workshop is a pretty good resource developing Python plugins: http://www.qgisworkshop.org/html/workshop/index.html. It covers:

  • Introduction to QGIS, Python, QT and PyQT
  • How Python can be used in QGIS
  • Building Python Plugins
  • Event-Driven Notes / Debugging / Plugin Repositories

The PyQGIS Cookbook offers a lot of code snippets for Python plugins: http://www.qgis.org/pyqgis-cookbook/index.html

If you get stuck, the QGIS developer mailing list is there to help you.

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The workshop link is an excellent resources. I require just a small clarification: What are the C++ plugin for? Is it obsolete? – Devdatta Tengshe Oct 20 '11 at 13:58
1  
C++ plugins are not obsolete per se, but most documentation effort has been put into Python plugins. C++ still has it's place for performance critical things and functionality that is supposed to be merged into QGIS core. – underdark♦ Oct 20 '11 at 14:03
thanks for the quick answer. – Devdatta Tengshe Oct 20 '11 at 14:10
up vote 7 down vote

Basically you need to know 3 things:
1) Python : http://www.python.org/
2) PyQT (to make the user interface, if you want one) : http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/software/pyqt/intro
3) Qgis API : http://doc.qgis.org/head/

They are all very well documented, to get started I recommend you to browse through the modules of the Qgis API and play with the python console doing basic things like accessing the features of a vector layer.

Later, after you get the feel of the api, you can ask more specific questions here on GISse.
An Example: Using Qgis API and python, how can I return latitude and longitude of a point?

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browsing the ftools code is usually a good point of start as it covers most of the vector functions used by the api and python – dassouki Oct 20 '11 at 18:28
up vote 4 down vote

There is also a QGIS Plugin-Creator, which prepares a basic skeleton of a plugin to get you started. It creates all necessary files for you.

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