gaim/PLUGIN_HOWTO

For information on writing a plugin for Gaim, go
http://gaim.sourceforge.net/api/ and see the HOWTOs in the
"Related Pages" section.

You can also generate this documentation locally by installing
doxygen and graphviz dot, then running "make docs" in the Gaim
source tree.  The documentation will be in the docs/html directory.

This next paragraph is old and possibly out of date:
Compilation of the plugins is fairly straight-forward; there is a
Makefile in this directory that has a rule for making the .so file
from a .c file. No modification of the Makefile should be necessary,
unless if you simply want to type 'make' to have it made; otherwise,
'make filename.so' will take filename.c and make the .so plugin from
it. If you need to link in with extra libraries, you can set the
environment variable PLUGIN_LIBS to be the libraries you want to link
with.

It should be possible to compile plugins outside of the Gaim source
tree, which is a much cleaner solution.