Thursday, April 29th, 2010 at 4:53 pm by Doug Blank

The latest version of Gramps 3.2 (version 3.2.2) builds on many great features. In this series of posts, I thought I would point out some of my favorite features. Some of these are new, and some have been a part of Gramps for a while.

One brand new part of Gramps is the ability to add and update “Addons”. Addons are third-party extensions made by users and developers of Gramps, but aren’t officially part of Gramps. These plugins have been possible since the early days of Gramps, but now are immediately available and easily installable. Before, the plugins were only available through a webpage (and you can still browse them there). But now you can see, and load them from right inside Gramps.

If you go to the menu and select Help, then Plugin Manager, you’ll see a dialog pop up. Select the Install Addons tab, and you’ll see an empty list. Press the Refresh Addon List (when you have an internet connection) and you should see a window similar to:

From here you can browse the extensions available (this is the same list from the wiki). Currently it is only available in English. That will be fixed in Gramps 3.3.

You can pick and choose what Addons you would like to add, or you can click on Install All Addons. Later, you can hide the ones that you don’t like by marking them “hidden” in the Registered Plugins tab of this dialog.

Beware: these Addons are in various states of development. One experimental, but useful, addon is the Split Views addon. If you install it (and restart Gramps) you’ll see a new category of views on the left-hand side of the main Gramps window. Select it, and you’ll see about 15 views in this category. You can select one of the views from the toolbar. Here is a sample:

This gives you two panes: one of the standard views, and a gramplet pane. By default, it will load a ToDo Gramplet. Close that, if you wish, and add your favorites. One gramplet that I like along side the People View is the Timeline Quickview running in the Quickview Gramplet. To add it, first add the Quickview Gramplet by right-clicking in the gramplet pane. Select “Add Gramplet” and select “Quickview Gramplet”. (Quickviews can also be run in any list view by right-clicking a row).

Next, from the menu select View, and from there Configure View…. That will bring up a dialog to configure this view:

Select the “Quickview” tab and change the Quickviews option to “Timeline” and press Save.

Please let us know what your favorite features of Gramps are. We’ll continue to highlight tricks, tips, and favorites right here.

-Doug