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Liferea Plugins Tutorial Part 3

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Welcome to a new installment of the plugins tutorial! Todays issue will cover menu modifications. This allows you to add new menu options for features you introduce with your plugin.

Extending a menu in PyGI

Now how do we extend a Liferea menu? First we get the menu from the GtkBuilder:

self.menu = self.shell.get_property("builder").get_object("tools_menu")

Now we can append a new menu action:

toolsmenu.append ('Menu Entry Title', 'app.MyPluginMenuEntry')

Finally we have to create an action matching app.MyPluginMenuEntry:

action = Gio.SimpleAction.new ('MyPluginMenuEntry', None)
action.connect("activate", self._menu_callback)

self._app = Liferea.Shell.get_window().get_application ()
self._app.add_action (action)

Available Menus

You probably noticed the ToolsMenu and MainwindowMenubar ids in the XML snippet above. Here is a list of all menu ids in 1.14 which also can be found in glade/liferea_menu.ui.

submenu idDescription
feed_menuAll actions regarding subscriptions and the feed list
item_menuAll actions regarding the item list
view_menuAll actions controlling reading layout
tools_menuThe menu to access preferences and update status
help_menuThe place to go for help

Complete Solution

Everything put together in a plugin could look like this:

import gi

gi.require_version('Gtk', '3.0')

from gi.repository import GObject, Liferea, Gtk

class AppActivatable(GObject.Object, Liferea.ShellActivatable):
    __gtype_name__ = "MyPluginAppActivatable"

    shell = GObject.property(type=Liferea.Shell)

    def __init__(self):
        GObject.Object.__init__(self)

    def do_activate(self):
        action = Gio.SimpleAction.new ('InstallPlugins', None)
        action.connect("activate", self._run)

        self._app = self.shell.get_window().get_application ()
        self._app.add_action (action)

        toolsmenu = self.shell.get_property("builder").get_object ("tools_menu")
        toolsmenu.append (_('Plugins'), 'app.InstallPlugins')
        
    def do_deactivate(self):
        self._browser = None
        self._app.remove_action ('InstallPlugins')
        self.app = None

def _run(self, action, data=None):
        print("Menu action triggered")

For a real world example have a look at https://github.com/lwindolf/liferea/blob/master/plugins/plugin-installer.py

Also check out the other plugin tutorial posts