Banshee Extensions Getting Easier

The Banshee Project is working on making it easier for developers to make extensions and get them to users. Gabriel Burt, who works on the Banshee Project, announced yesterday the Banshee Community Extensions (BCE) sub-project.

Banshee, a video and music player for Linux, allows developers to create extensions to add functionality not in the core program. Many of Banshee's features are implemented through extensions and included in the main Banshee codebase. This makes Banshee much more flexible and extendable, but getting extensions included in the main release requires a lot of coordination with the main developers. The BCE breakout will make it much easier for third-party developers to create extensions for Banshee and host them in a central repository.

The project is hosted on Gitorious, a open source hosting site for projects that use Git version control. Gitorious is also home to Amarok, Qt, and a number of other popular (and obscure) projects. Hosting on Gitorious allows all interested developers to work on extensions and push them to the BCE repository.

The Banshee team has a guide for developers interested in writing extensions, along with docs on writing code for Banshee and the GNOME Git guide. The current release of Banshee is 1.5.3, with 1.5.4 expected within a week or so. Pre-release packages are available already for openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise and in a Personal Package Archive for Ubuntu.

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is a freelance writer and editor with more than 10 years covering IT. Formerly the openSUSE Community Manager for Novell, Brockmeier has written for Linux Magazine, Sys Admin, Linux Pro Magazine, IBM developerWorks, Linux.com, CIO.com, Linux Weekly News, ZDNet, and many other publications. You can reach Zonker at jzb@zonker.net and follow him on Twitter.