There are two ways to load and unload a plug-in. The easiest way to load a plug-in is to use the Plug-in Manager.
To load a plug-in from the Plug-in manager
The Plug-in Manager uses the MAYA_PLUG_IN_PATH environment variable to locate available plug-ins to load.
The MAYA_PLUG_IN_PATH is scanned only once when you first open the window. This allows subsequent opens to be very fast. As a result, if you create a new plug-in on the MAYA_PLUG_IN_PATH while Maya is running, it will not show up in the Plug-in Manager. To access newly created plug-ins, do one of the following:
To load a plug-in from the command line
loadPlugin “hello”;
This searches MAYA_PLUG_IN_PATH for a file named hello.so on the Linux platform, a file named hello.mll on the Windows platform, and a file named hello.bundle on Mac OS X. Once found, it will be loaded into Maya as a plug-in.