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PyQGIS Cookbook revision 2020

We are happy to announce that the PyQGIS Cookbook has received a complete overhaul and is now better than ever.

The PyQGIS Cookbook is a great source of information, not only for PyQGIS beginners or plugin developers, but also for C++ developers: it contains a lot of information about the internals of the QGIS API that you cannot really find anywhere else.

The main point addressed in this review were:

  1. All the code snippets have been reviewed and put under automated test in CI. Before this revision, there were 62 tests. Now there are over 300 tested snippets.
  2. A few snippets had to be updated because of changes in the QGIS API or because of the deprecation of methods (CRS handling in particular due to the proj6 switch).
  3. Textual descriptions have been edited to update the contents where the API has substantially changed.
  4. The material covering Python for QGIS Server has been reorganized and now includes new snippets and introductory texts about the new modules and OGC APIs architecture.

For the full summary, please refer to Alessandro Pasotti’s report on the PSC mailing list.

Thank you to Alessandro Pasotti for taking on this project and thank you to all our sponsor and donors who make this initiative possible!

New PyQGIS documentation

We are proud to announce our new dedicated documentation of the QGIS Python API (also called PyQGIS) which is now available at https://qgis.org/pyqgis:

While the QGIS API has long been documented, Python developers in the past had to work with the general C++ documentation that wasn’t always straightforward to use. The new PyQGIS documentation presents the API in an accessible pythonic manner.

Of course, creating a good API documentation from source code in an automated way, is not trivial. A key challenge was to automatically create Python bindings files (or SIP files). A custom Perl script known as “sipify” now enables us to automatically integrate the C++ documentation into the Python bindings and keep them up to date. Another challenge was to create the documentation itself using Sphinx. Two detailed reports containing all the technical details of the first and second generation of the documentation are available if you want to learn more about the underlying architecture.

This has been a really important infrastructure project for QGIS that has been made possible by support from our donors and sponsors, as well as the generous in-kind contributions of our community members.

Documentation for QGIS 3.0 – call for contributions!

Dear QGIS users, enthusiasts and fine people out there. QGIS 3.0 is coming very soon….we are in a ‘soft freeze’ state at the moment while we wait for some critical last pieces of code to get finalised. Then we go into hard freeze and prepare to roll out our next major release. Those of you that have been playing with the ‘2.99’ builds will surely have noticed that QGIS 3.0 is going to feature a huge number of improvements and new features – both in the user interface and in the API and code internals.

Screen Shot 2017-12-03 at 23.05.34

But we have a BIG problem:
we need your help to document and describe all those fine new features!

Yes fine reader now is the time to break out of the ‘passive user of QGIS’ mould you might find yourself in and lend a hand. We have an issue tracker with an issue for each of the new features that has landed in QGIS 3.0. Even if you do not know how to use our Sphinx based documentation system, you can help tremendously by preparing the prose that should be used to describe new features and attaching it to the issue list linked to above. If you do that, the documentation team can do more editorial work and less  ‘writing from scratch’ work.

Writing documentation is a brilliant way to enhance your own knowledge of QGIS and learn the new features that are coming in the next release. For those starting out with documentation there are issue reports that are tagged “easy” to lower the barrier for beginners. If you are an existing documentation team member it would be great if you could review the list and check whether there are more issues that can be tagged as “easy”.

The issue list is automatically created whenever a developer commits a change to QGIS with the word ‘FEATURE’ in their change notes. In some cases the change may not be something that an end user will be able to see – so it will be great for volunteers to also review the automatically added issues and close off any that are not relevant for documentation.

Other features are quite complex and in some cases could benefit from interaction with the original developer to make sure that the nuances of the new features are properly described. We need documentation writers to follow these thread and present the new functionality in a clear and concise way.

There are some very helpful resources for people just getting started with QGIS documentation. You can read the documentation for contributors. You can also contact the team via the community mailing list for specific help if the contributor docs don’t provide the information you need.

If you want to see the QGIS Documentation up-to-date for the version 3.0 release, please do get involved and help Yves Jacolin and the documentation team!

Lastly if you are not able to directly contribute to the documentation, consider funding QGIS – we have a budget for documentation improvements.

We look forward to your support and contributions!

 

Tim Sutton (QGIS Project Chairman)

 

 

 

 

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