Overview

In the standard installation, MediaPortal 2 is a full-featured MediaCenter application with many features. However, MediaPortal 2 was developed with extensibility in mind. That means, an installed MediaPortal 2 system can simply be extended in function, skin or behavior.

Plugins

The way to extend MediaPortal 2 is by installing Plugins. A plugin is a logical package containing several resources like skin enhancements, language resources, additional media accessor code or other. Plugins can be installed or deinstalled as a whole. The system automatically managed plugin dependencies, telling you that a plugin cannot be installed because of a missing necessary other plugin, for example.

Plugin Resource Types

Language Resources

Language resources add a set of localized strings for one or more languages. The current language can be changed via the MediaPortal 2 configuration application or inside the MediaPortal 2 GUI.

Skin Resources

Skin resources add a complete skin or a part of a skin to MediaPortal 2. Skin resources can also extend available skins with new themes. The current skin and theme can be changed via the MediaPortal 2 configuration application or inside the MediaPortal 2 GUI.

GUI Enhancements

A GUI enhancement can add various functionality to the application. It can add new application modules providing a game, for example, or it can add funtionality to an already present module like the TV scheduler. It can also change the MediaPortal 2 main menu.

Other resources

Basically, every MediaPortal 2 module can provide a means to be extended by plugins. So here, it is not possible to describe every possible plugin type. Over the time, MediaPortal 2 will provide more and more extension points where plugins can plug-in. For example, the database driver for MediaPortal 2 is a plugin, MetadataExtractors and ResourceProviders can be added by plugins and many more.