Well I haven't done the posting I promised, because I've been working on a small project in my spare time: my first python plasmoid for KDE 4. It's a nice little dictionary plugin similar to the kdict panel plugin in KDE 3.
The current KDE 4 dictionary plasmoid is somewhat limited, so as part of wanting to learn to make plasmoids, I set out to correct that. I soon found out why it was so limited.
Plasma gives you the ability to create dataengines, which you can think of as reusable data models. Ideally, you create a data engine for, say, dict lookups; then you can just create the interface how you like and connect it up to the data engine for data.
Not quite that simple in this case. Unfortunately the dict data engine needs some work, as it is hardcoded to a single dictionary on a single server,and provides no means of changing this. After consulting the plasma-devel mailing list, it looked like my options were to either fix the data engine myself (not gonna happen with my c++ skills), or code around it.
The result is a plasmoid that gives you three options of backends: the original dataengine, the python-dictclient library, or the console dict command. Each has different capabilities, so I give the ability to switch between them.
I have a few last bugs to work through, and I think I'll release it tonight on kde-look.org.
Once that's gotten fairly stable, my next goal is to put my gained knowledge into a tutorial so others won't have to go through the agony that I had to in figuring out a lot of basic things. The techbase tutorials are extremely lacking, I'm afraid....
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