This document describes how to write your own plugins. Note, that at the time of this writing, some of the concepts are not yet set in stone. Therefore, this document should be regarded as an introduction to the current approach, and as a basis for discussion. All sorts of comments are welcome. The documentation has grown quite large over time. Do not let that scare you. We recommend reading through the four basic steps (as outlined, below), to get a basic idea of how things work. After that you may want to skim the table of contents to see which advanced topics could be of relevance to you.

For questions and comments, please write to the RKWard development mailing list.

You do not need to read this in order to use RKWard. This document is about extending RKWard. It is targeted at advanced users, or people willing to help improve RKWard.

Writing a standard plugin is basically a four-step process:

Those will be dealt with in turn.

Some advanced concepts may be used in those four steps, but are dealt with in separate chapters, to keep things simple:

Also, none of the chapters shows all options, but rather only the basic concepts. A complete reference of options is provided separately.