Using minidom to get values from XML. Is this really the easiest way to do it?

manifest.xml

<plugin>
	<name>Plugin</name>
	<version>0.0.0</version>
	<description>The framework upon which all Dojo plugins are built.</description>
	<url>http://n1nja.com/projects/dojo-server/core/</url>
	<authors>
		<author>
			<name>Colin Haber</name>
			<nickname>N1nja</nickname>
			<mcname>anorexicpuppy</mcname>
			<url>http://n1nja.com/</url>
		</author>
	</authors>
</plugin>

ManifestParser.py

def getTitle(self, filename="manifest.xml"):
    doc = minidom.parse(filename)
    plugin = doc.childNodes[0]
    for node in plugin.childNodes:
        if node.nodeType == Node.ELEMENT_NODE and node.nodeName == "name":
            for child in node.childNodes:
                if child.nodeType == Node.TEXT_NODE:
                    return child.data

getTitle() is just returning the data inside the <name> tags. It seems a bit wordy, still, for Python. I've done DOM stuff in Java so I know how verbose it can be, but is there a better way?

As far as I know yes it is.

unless there is a getElementsByTagName(String) function like in javascript

There is. You can use that to get all the name tags. Although it probably does exactly what you do.

The thing is, that acts recursively, which means that I can't change the spec later to include a <name> tag nested somewhere else. My implementation only takes data from a first-level <name> tag.

This is true. Then what you have is best as far as I know.