<page	xmlns="http://projectmallard.org/1.0/"
	type="guide"
	id="extending">

<info>
	<link type="guide" xref="index#advanced"/>
        <desc>Writing your own channel plugins.</desc>
</info>

	<title>Extension Howto</title>

	<p>Streamtuner2 is written in Python, a rather easy programming language. And it's also rather simple
	to write a new channel plugin.</p>

	<p>The basic layout of every channel plugin is as follows:</p>

	<code type="text/python">

from channels import *

class myplugin (ChannelPlugin):

    title = "MyNewChannel"
    module = "myplugin"
    homepage = "http://www.mymusicstation.com/"
    categories = []



    def update_categories(self):
    
        self.categories = []



    def update_streams(self, cat, force=0):

        entries = []

        # ...
        # get it from somewhere
        # ...        

        return entries
        
	</code>

	<p>There are some self-explanatory description fields, and two important methods. Sometimes you
        don't need categories even. The update_streams() function often downloads a website, parses it
	with regular expressions or PyQuery / DOM methods, and packs into into a result list.</p>	

	<p>Here entries is a list of dictionaries, with standardized entry names like "title" and "playing"
	for the description, and "homepage" for a browsable link, and most importantly "url" for the
	actual streaming link. Often you want to add a "genre" and "format" and "bitrate" info. But this depends
	on your plugins data source, really.</p>
	
	
</page>