[Avogadro-Discuss] Developing a Python plugin for Avogadro on Windows

[Noel O'B. <bao...@gm...>]

Hello all,

I've written up my experience developing a plugin that allows the user
to open files with cclib at
http://baoilleach.blogspot.com/2010/04/plug-cclib-into-avogadro.html.
It worked up to a point, but I ran into a couple of problems/strange
behaviour:

    * There should be no need to have the OpenBabel Python bindings
installed separately, but there is no way to access the OpenBabel
library in Avogadro (at least on Windows). This prevents me, for
example, from calling ConnectTheDots (I had to use my own installation
of OpenBabel) or to add Conformers (which was what I wanted to do).
    * There are two Script menus after installing this plugin!
    * How do I emit a debug message?
    * The Python prompt in Avogadro requires you to "print" everything
to see its value. This should not be necessary.
    * Cutting and pasting multiple lines into the Python prompt works
fine, but it looks pretty weird as the prompt (>>>) is missing.

- Noel