[Evolution-hackers] Getting started with extensions/plugins

[Stephen Finucane <sfinucan redhat com>]

Howdy,

tl;dr: Are there any resources available for someone interested in
creating a new plugin for Evolution?

I use a combination of GMail and Bluejeans for my email and video
conferencing needs at work. The web experience of this is decent, with
"Add a Bluejeans meetings" buttons provided in GMail by way of an
extension. However, I'd like to get a similar experience in Evolution.
I don't imagine this would be too difficult, given that Bluejeans
provides a REST API [1]. My question is: where to start?

Looking at the wiki [2] it seems the extension framework is preferred
to the EPlugin hooks. Unfortunately, I've no experience developing
against the Gnome/GTK "platform". The example on the wiki itself is
helpful but, alas, not complete (all the autotools-boilerplate is
missing, and this is a non-trivial thing to write for someone who
writes Python all day :)). In addition, most of the existing, third-
party plugins that I found were old and EPlugin-based, making them
unsuitable to base my own work off.

Are there any resources or sample plugins that I could look at to get
started here? I've given a list of the features I'm hoping to implement
below, just in case any of them don't make sense. I'm pretty sure I
could work my through this over a few months, but I really just to get
something simple compiling and running and build upon that.

Cheers,
Stephen

[1] https://gist.github.com/Aldaviva/e8932ccad09aa4105c50a22f111d5583 
[2] https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evolution/Extensions

---

What I want:

* "Schedule meeting" button in the New Meeting window, like so:
  https://static.bluejeans.com/website/sites/default/files/uploaded_ima
ges/schedule-meeting-arrows.jpg
  This will create a new Bluejeans meeting and add the details to the
  event
* "Join meeting" link in an Events context event
* "Join online" button in alerts (don't know if Evolution has these?)
  https://ssl.uh.edu/infotech/_images/lync/join/2013/join-2013-reminder
.jpg
* ...?