Wow, lots of responses!

I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed about now. I've never done any major coding before, just school projects, and a bit of goofing of on my own. I apologize if my responses or ideas of what needs to be done seem naive -- I'm trying to learn as I go here. I'd like to make something usefull, but if I try to bite off something too big, I'll never get it done.

Here goes...

Alan Horkan I tend to think of clipart being used when people want a specific image rather than browsing and I would think the most efficient approach would be to provide a keyword based search and only show matching results so there would be much less to render.

You seem to be describing two scenarios. 1) You want a specific image and 2) You want an image from a certain category (or tag).

If you want a specific image, then the current import function works great. My personal typical clipart use scenario is along the lines of "I need a car, what do I have in cars" -- That's what I'd consider browsing. eg. Looking through the categories of interest. I didn't mean general browsing of the library, just task specific browsing.

Alan Horkan (Ideally if you can seperate your work out into a library maybe other projects interested in OpenClipart will reuse it.)

I'm not sure I'm that tallented at the moment. :-/ I'll look at it though.

Bryce Then perhaps you can focus on just "#2. Library browser". This allows you to not worry about the download/upload capabilities, just stub out the inserter, etc. Others who may be interested in this could then focus on owning development of those other pieces.

The approach of having a managed local cache of clipart has several further benefits. It permits offline use of the clipart that the user has used in the past. It enables the user to refresh and fill in the cache when they're not working,

Online browsing hadn't entered into my initial thoughts at all. I was imagining downloading a zipped collection of clipart (a-la an OCAL release), pointing Inkscape at that library, and browsing that.

John Cliff & Jon Phillips

...

we had a google SOC project last year that worked on pretty much exatcly this functionality, except it was done as an external utility that linked in through the extensions code.

http://developer.berlios.de/projects/ocalhelper/

Yep, I would definitely use this code as a starting point, because it worked prior to using ccHost and allowed one to pull from the website and/or from a locally installed package.

Please also look at how our SoC student from last summer made a standalone app with python and then created an extension so we could just make use of what already exists...this will help this be usable by other apps.

I'll definately take a look at this -- I wasn't aware of this project. Assuming it's usable, and I could just update it and the extension, would it be possible to have the "Import Clipart" menu item below the current "Import" menu item? I havnen't looked too closely at any extensions code yet.