Posts by QGIS Project blog

In the last month of October, 18 new plugins were published in the QGIS plugin repository.

Here follows the quick overview in reverse chronological order. If any of the names or short descriptions catches your attention, you can find the direct link to the plugin page in the table below:

In September a total of 20 new plugins were published in the QGIS plugin repository.

Highlight

In the last month some AI-related plugins became available for users, namely IntelliGeo and TreeEyed, which in addition to the increasing number of tools, greatly contribute for the adaptation of QGIS to current and future needs, showcasing it as one of the best options for beginners and experts alike to conduct a number of geospatial analyses.

As stated by their authors, with IntelliGeo there’s a chat interface where users can detail their requests, and the output is either a PyQGIS code or a graphical processing model, which can in turn be executed directly in QGIS.

As for the TreeEyed plugin, its main objective is the monitoring of trees by generating vector and raster datasets from high resolution RGB imagery.

Overview

Here follows the quick overview in reverse chronological order. If any of the names or short descriptions catches your attention, you can find the direct link to the plugin page in the table below:

This year’s user conference took place in Bratislava, organized by the Slovak QGIS User Group and hosted at the Slovak University of Technology Faculty of Civil Engineering. The event was sold out early and the venue was full of energy and excitement.

If you missed the conference or couldn’t make it to a talk due to too many great overlapping sessions, you now have the opportunity to catch up with everything on the UC 2024 playing list:

Thanks to the organizers, speakers, sponsors, and all participants for the wonderful event.

If you want to read some personal reports from community members, here’s Ujaval Gandhi’s report: https://spatialthoughts.com/2024/09/14/qgis-user-conference-2024; and here’s Hans van der Kwast’s: https://www.qwast-gis.com/l/qgis-user-conference-2024/

Last but not least, we want you to save the date for next year’s user conference:

The QGIS User Conference will be in Norrköping, Sweden from 2-3 June 2025, and contributor meeting there after 4-7.

In last August, there were 24 new plugins published in the QGIS plugin repository.

Highlight

“Help us create the world’s most advanced open database on litter, brands & plastic pollution.”

This sentence welcomes us to the website of the OpenLitterMap project, which aims at providing tools for any and all citizens to capture data on litter worldwide. This data can now be directly accessed in QGIS for visualisation and analysis purposes, thanks to the efforts of the plugin’s author NaturalGIS. Well done to everyone involved, and we wish all the luck to this great project.

Overview

Here follows the quick overview in reverse chronological order. If any of the names or short descriptions catches your attention, you can find the direct link to the plugin page in the table below:

With the QGIS Grant Programme 2023, we were able to support six proposals (four in the first round and two in the second round) that are aimed to improve the QGIS project, including software, infrastructure, and documentation. The following reports summarize the work performed in the first four proposals:  

1. QGIS Bug Tracker cleanup (#266)  – Report
    We have identified and closed ~291 tickets, among them:
   • 162 bugreports and feature requests which were already fixed or implemented
   • 29 bugreports and feature requests which are invalid (data issues, wrong use of functionality, etc)
   • 57 duplicate bugreports and feature requests
   • 5 won’t fix bugreports
   • 5 bugreports were converted to feature requests
   • 33 tickets were closed (does not contain steps to reproduce, test data and no feedback was provided within several month)
   • Additionally we ensured that all tickets has correct tags assigned to to make them easier to find.
2. Porting to C++ and harmonization of Processing algorithms (#271) – Report
   The QGIS Porting to C++ and Harmonisation of Processing Algorithms grant is now complete.
   • Existing Processing algorithms Voronoi Polygons and Delaunay Triangulation have been ported to C++ and now use GEOS instead of the unmaintained Python module.
   • Two algorithms for generating XYZ tiles (directory and MBTiles variants) have been ported to C++ using a safer and cleaner multi-threading approach.
   • The Align Rasters tool, which was not exposed to Processing, has been removed and a new Processing algorithm with the same functionality has been added.
   • The existing Raster Calculator algorithm has been ported to C++. The algorithm now has two variants: a toolbox version that works the same way as before, and a modeler version that uses the same approach to input naming as the GDAL raster calculator.
3. Add vertical CRS handling to QGIS (#267) – Report
   • As of QGIS 3.34, QGIS can now create and handle vertical and compound CRSes.
   • In QGIS 3.34 coordinate transforms were reworked so that they function correctly with vertical transformation, if both the source and destination CRS have vertical components.
   • In QGIS 3.36 the coordinate reference selection widgets were updated to offer choices of 2d only, compound, or vertical only CRSes.
   • In version 3.38, we introduced a new setting for QGIS projects, for their vertical reference system. Users can control this through project properties, and it’s accessible via PyQGIS and via associated expression variables (eg @project_vertical_crs) for use in print layouts.
   • Similarly, in 3.38 we introduced the API support for map layers to have a vertical CRS. (This was not exposed to users in 3.38 though)
   • In QGIS 3.40 so far we have exposed the vertical CRS setting for vector layers to users (via the layer properties dialog), allowing users to specify the associated vertical CRS for these layers. The vertical CRS is respected in elevation profile plots, in Identify tool results, and in 3D Map views (assuming the 3D map is created with an associated vertical CRS).
   • There is an open pull-request for 3.40 to expose the vertical CRS for point cloud layers in a similar way, with the vertical CRS being respected in elevation profiles, identify tool results, and 3D map views
   • We have open pull requests for 3.40 to show layer vertical CRS information in the layer properties “information” pages, and add expression variables at the layer scope (eg @layer_vertical_crs).
4. Improve test result handling on QGIS CI (#268) – Report
   Any tests which fail a rendering comparison will write a descriptive comment to the PR. The comment details which render tests failed, where they are in the code, and includes some helpful pointers to downloading the full test report and the QGIS developer documentation. We also implemented lots of improvements in running the tests locally and how the render test reports are generated and presented to developers.

Thank you to everyone who participated and made this round of grants a great success and thank you to all our sustaining members and donors who make this initiative possible!

For the last month of July, one short of 30 new plugins were published in the QGIS plugin repository.

Here follows the quick overview in reverse chronological order. If any of the names or short descriptions catches your attention, you can find the direct link to the plugin page in the table below:

We have a new website!

We recently launched our new website at QGIS.org. It is a ground-up overhaul and provides a fresh take on the first contact point for existing or potential users wishing to engage with the QGIS project and discover its value proposition.

A new strategy for QGIS.org websites

In this blog post, we would like to provide an overview of the goals that we had for building the new QGIS.org website and the bigger picture of how this website update fits into the broader strategy for our website plans for QGIS.

About two years ago, we started experimenting with building a new QGIS.org website based on Hugo. Hugo, as a technology choice, was less important than was our intent to develop a more modern site that addressed our strategic goals.

After some ‘in-house’ (i.e. volunteer-based) work to develop an initial version of the site, we received the go-ahead to use QGIS funds for this and put out a call in October 2023 for a company to support our work. This was ultimately won by Kontur.io, who, together with our volunteers, brought the work into high gear.

Goal 1: Speak to a new audience

Our primary goal was to speak to a new audience. We are confident that QGIS can compete with all of the commercial vendors providing GIS software. We didn’t convey that well on our old website. We feel that QGIS was too apologetic in how it presented itself. We wanted a website which inspires confidence while addressing the needs of a corporate or organisational decision-maker who is looking at the QGIS project during their GIS software selection process.

The old website was very focused on the developer and contributor community. Obviously, those aspects are important since, without our fantastic community, the QGIS project would not exist. The messaging around open source is also important. Yet these ideas are secondary to the idea that QGIS is one of the best (if not the best) desktop GIS applications out there on the market – open-source or otherwise. We need to present it in this professional perspective.

So, the first goal was to change the messaging to focus on QGIS’s value proposition and take a very professional approach to presenting ourselves on the website.

Goal 2: Harmonisation

The second goal was to start the process of harmonising all of our website properties. QGIS.org, over the years, has built many different web properties. For example, there’s the plugins website, the feed, the changelog, the sustaining members website, the lessons website and the certification website, the new resources hub website, the API documentation, the user documentation, the user manual, the training manual, various other documentation efforts, and more. Some of those are combined in one application, There are also some less well-known resources, like our analytics.qgis.org and another one for plugin analytics. In short, we’ve a lot of resources!

With so many different web properties, they’ve devolved over time: each has its own look and feel, navigation approach and how you interact with it. Some of them were translated, and some of them were not. We want to harmonise all of these sites so that the user does not notice any change in user experience when they move from one QGIS-related site to another.

Goal 3: Harmonising deployment

In the underlying process of these changes, we’re also redeploying all of the websites on new servers, which are more up-to-date and use better security and maintenance practices. Plenty of work is happening in the background to ensure that all of the servers are in a better-maintained state, document how they’re maintained, and so on.

Goal 4: A hub and spokes

The objective of the new site design is to allow quick movement between the QGIS auxiliary sites. The QGIS.org site will form a hub that effortlessly takes visitors to whichever QGIS-related site they need to complete the task they are busy with. If you’re moving between these sites, the experience should be seamless. You should not really even be aware that you’re moving between different websites. Other than looking at the URL bar, the user presentation and experience should be harmonious between all of them.

One way we are planning to achieve this is to have a universal menu bar and footer. You will see that in the new website’s design, there is a menu bar across the top. This menu bar has two levels: the top menu and the second level, where the search bar is.

In this second row, auxiliary sites will have their own sub-menu whilst keeping the shared top-level menu. So if you, for example, are moving around in plugins and want to review the plugin list or submit a new plugin, all of that navigation will be on the second line where the search bar is currently. Regardless of which subdomain you are on, the top-level menu bar will be the same, allowing you to easily navigate back to the hub or to another subdomain.

The footer will be unified and shared between all sites, and the cascading style sheets and styling will be unified across all of the QGIS websites.

In the next phase, we will work to achieve this coherence across all the websites, though we still have a few more tweaks to make to the qgis.org site first.

Goal 5: DOTDOTW – do one thing, do one thing well

We plan to break some auxiliary websites apart into separate pieces. So, for example, the changelog management, certification management, sustaining members management, and lessons management are all in one Django app. We will split them into small single-purpose applications using some common UX metaphors so that each is a standalone application that makes it easy for a potential contributor to understand everything the application does. This will also simplify management as we can upgrade each auxiliary site on separate development cycles. We will also finally have semantic URLs, e.g. certification.qgis.org, to take you to the different areas of interest on the site.

The plugins.qgis.org is also going to be refactored so that it just has plugins and not the resource sharing we’ve added in the last few years. The resource sharing will go into its own subdomain. Similarly, the Planet website will get split into its own website (the planet is a blog aggregator or RSS aggregator) that will be in its own managed instance. Some other components (like the analytics) are difficult to split out like this because they’re linked to the same database. We will try to make sure that those are more discoverable and theme them as much as possible to match the rest of the website experience.

Goal 7: Encapsulation

Another goal we had for the QGIS.org makeover was to make the site performant and self-contained. By self-contained, we mean that it should not ‘call’ out to CDN, Google or other platforms for resources like fonts, CSS frameworks, javascript libraries, etc. There were two reasons for this:

1. These platforms often use such resources to track users as they move around the Internet, which we want to avoid as much as possible.
2. We want to wholly manage our site, be able to fix any issues independently and generally follow a path of self-determination.

Our approach also facilitated the creation of a very performant website, as you can see here. We will try to adhere to these principles for the auxiliary site updates we do in the future, too.

What about translations?

The question has come up: Why did we not want to translate the new QGIS.org when it was translated before?

Firstly, we should make it clear that we do not plan to remove translations from the user documentation, the user manual, and so on, where we think they have the most value.

For the main QGIS.org site, we question whether there is a high value in translating it. Here are some reasons why:

1. Lingua franca: If you are an IT manager in a non-English-speaking country and you want to evaluate some software, you’re going to run into a product page that presents itself in English – it is the norm for IT procurement to work in English for reviewing software products and so on.

2. Automation: Automated translations inside browsers are getting better and better. While these translations are still not completely adequate, we think they will be in one or two years’ time.

3. Translation integrity: Our pursuit of Goal 1 means that we would no longer find it acceptable to have partial website translations. We also need to ensure that the wording and phrasing are consistent with the English messaging. We also have concerns about the QA process regarding trust and review – we want to ensure that any translation truly reflects the meaning and intent of the original content and has not been adjusted during the translation process.

4. Cohesion: Our most important point is raised if we go back to this idea of cohesion between the different websites like QGIS.org, plugins.qgis.org and so on. As well as having the same styling, we also don’t want to switch between languages as you hop between the sites. We aim to present them all as one site. If we translate QGIS.org and then take you to our auxiliary sites, e.g., plugins.qgis.org, the feed, or certification pages, which are in English only, the experience is jarring.

So we must either translate everything into all of the same languages, or work in English. Translating everything is a mammoth task for the translators and for us to retrospectively add translation support to each platform. Thus, we prefer the approach of harmonising everything to one language and then focusing our translation efforts on three areas:

1. The application itself,
2. the user manual and
3. the training manuals.

We can leave the rest of the experience in English and instead focus on harmonising, for now, both in terms of look and feel and the technology used.

When we consider everything as one big website and what the bigger plan is, it is hopefully clearer why we didn’t think translating the landing page and QGIS.org was the best approach.

Further funded work

We hope to use more QGIS funding to support this work in the future. We’re also hoping to work again with Kontur to start moving all these auxiliary sites into their own projects, applying our style guidelines to each. Independently of that, Tim (volunteer), Lova (QGIS funded), and others are already getting started with this process.

Helping out

Do you have strong opinions about the website? Contact Tim on the PSC mailing list if you would like to get involved as a volunteer. We would love to hear from designers, word smiths, marketers, information architects, SEO specialists, web developers and those who think they can help us achieve our goals.

Conclusion

We hope our goals and process make sense for everybody and that we were able to lay out a clear, logical argument about why we don’t want to translate the new website quite yet. We want to focus on these overarching goals and then return to them later if they are still a priority for people. Everything we have built is Open Source and available at this repo, where you can also find an issue tracker to report issues and share ideas relating to the new website.

Thanks for reading. Go spatial without compromise

Cheers, Tim, Marco and Anita

In the month of June, 23 new plugins were published in the QGIS plugin repository.

Here follows the quick overview in reverse chronological order. If any of the names or short descriptions catches your attention, you can find the direct link to the plugin page in the table below:

Between April and May there were 33 new plugins published in the QGIS plugin repository.

Highlights

We would like the use this opportunity to highlight two plugins, Viper (QGIS snake Clone) and Active Break.

Viper allows to emulate in QGIS canvas the popular game Snake, providing a fun time and a bit of nostalgia for the “older” users. However it goes further than that, as it serves the purpose of teaching about geospatial concepts such as geometry objects (points, polygons) with their properties and methods, spatial indexing in the form of R-Tree, but also programming in QGIS, as well as other aspects.

On a more serious tone, if it can be said that, we present Active Break, a plugin that “simply” presents messages at specific time intervals, which can be personalized by the user and range from the more technical such as “save your project”, personal or motivational like quotes from hundreds of people on multiple subjects, or perhaps the most important, routinely reminders to take a break, relax or go have lunch. This considering the long hours we spent daily in front of the computer, with all the physical and mental health, as well as social implications. Congratulations on both authors!

Overview

Here follows the quick overview in reverse chronological order. If any of the names or short descriptions catches your attention, you can find the direct link to the plugin page in the table below:

From February to March of this year, 58 new plugins were published in the QGIS plugin repository.

Here follows the quick overview in reverse chronological order. If any of the names or short descriptions catches your attention, you can find the direct link to the plugin page in the table below: