Wrting a new plugin is often trivial. Just create a new channels/name.py following this structure:

# title: MyPlugin
# description: my radio list
# version: 0.1
# type: channel
# category: radio

from channels import *

class myplugin (ChannelPlugin):
    title = "MyNewChannel"
    module = "myplugin"
    homepage = "http://www.mymusicstation.com/"
    has_search = False
    titles = dict(listeners=False)
    categories = []
    catmap = {}
    config = []

    def update_categories(self):
        self.categories = ["Pop", "Rock", "etc"]

    def update_streams(self, cat, search=None):
        entries = []
        # ...
        # get it from somewhere
        # ...        
        return entries

The description block on top is used for the plugin management. Some fields like title and and module are repeated in the class declaration though.

Each plugin needs a update_categories() method. This can be a stub, if the channel plugin has a static list of genres. If so, just set the categories = [] declaration right away. The method is only used if the default categories list is empty, needs to be renewed from the service (e.g. whenever the menu entry Channel>Update_categories is used). There's also a catmap={} dict in case category/genre titles have to be associated with service ids.

More importantly you need the update_streams() method to fetch station lists. It receives a cat parameter, for instance "Pop". Then do whatever API query or website scraping (regex/pyquery) is necessary to populate a list.

Most plugins will return a list of dicts like:

 {title: Radio123, url: http://pls, genre: Pop, playing: Song123}

The title is required, and the streaming URL of course. Other fields are mostly optional. (Received data gets stored internally in a streams={} dict.)

• Standard fields are: genre, title, url, playing, homepage, bitrate, listeners, favicon. Internal fields are: state, deleted, favourite.

• With a datamap=[] declaration custom field names could be displayed.

• Often you just want to rename the column titles however per title = (listeners="Whatever") in the class declaration.