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.

Background

Our web site (https://qgis.org) dates back to 2013, it is time for a revision!

As well as modernizing the look and feel of the site, we want the content to be updated to represent changes in the maturity of the project.

We want to appeal to new audiences, especially business and NGO decision makers (in particular the experience for the front pages), whilst still maintaining appeal to grass roots users (especially the lower level pages which contain many technical details and community collaboration notes).

We want to enhance our fund raising efforts through a site that encourages people to contribute to, as well as take from, the project.

Existing effort

First some key links:

• Current web site: https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Website
• Design for new web site landing page: https://qgis.github.io/QGIS-Hugo/
• Design for new web site (figma): https://www.figma.com/file/1jFYgq9R5nwHChf4HhhHpW/QGIS-(Copy)?type=design&node-id=301-299&mode=design&t=rvdeAl4RSuzKJftu-0 
• Code for new web site (what we have built so far): https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Hugo
• Plugins web site: https://plugins.qgis.org
• QGIS Documentation Site: https://www.qgis.org/en/docs/index.html 
• QGIS User Manual: https://docs.qgis.org/3.28/en/docs/user_manual/
• QGIS Server Manual: https://docs.qgis.org/3.28/en/docs/server_manual/
• Gentle Introduction to GIS: https://docs.qgis.org/3.28/en/docs/gentle_gis_introduction/
• QGIS Python Cookbook: https://docs.qgis.org/3.28/en/docs/pyqgis_developer_cookbook/
• QGIS C++  API Documentation: https://api.qgis.org/api/3.28/
• QGIS Python API Documentation: https://qgis.org/pyqgis/3.28/
• QGIS Certification and Changelog: https://changelog.qgis.org/en/

The above websites were created with a mix of technologies:

• Sphinx (rst)
• Doxygen
• Custom Django Apps

It will not be possible to unify the technology used for all of the above sites, but we want all of the web sites to have a cohesive appearance and the navigation flow between them to be seamless. For the main website at https://qgis.org and its child pages, we want to re-implement the site to provide a new experience – according to the design we have laid out in our figma board. Note that we want to follow this design. Some small tweaks will be fine but we are not looking for a ‘from scratch’ re-implementation of our design.

This will be our website for the next 10 years – you need to hand it over to us in a way that we can continue working on it and maintaining it without your intervention.

We are calling for proposals to help us with this migration as per the phases described below.

Phase 1⃣: Project planning

• Timeline
• Proposed site structure
  • What content will be kept
  • What will be removed
  • What is new to be added
• Keep front page as starting point
  • Suggest tweaks if needed
• Establish a clear vocabulary of page types
  • Second and third level page design
  • Special pages such as
    • Download
    • Release countdown
    • Donation / sustaining members
    • Gallery
    • and any other you identify as non-standard second/third level
• Guidance and standards for producing visuals like screenshots etc. For example, how we present QGIS screenshots in a flattering way.
• Establish a plan for auxiliary sites:
  • Plugins.qgis.org
  • Api.qgis.org
  • Docs.qgis.org
  • etc. (see intro for more exhaustive list)
• Iterative review and feedback from the QGIS web team should be incorporated from biweekly check in calls.

Outcome: We have a clear roadmap and design guide for migrating all of our websites to a consistent unified experience.

Phase 2⃣: Content migration of the main site

During this phase the contractor will focus on migrating the content of the main site to the new platform.

There will be an iterative review and feedback from the QGIS web team should be incorporated from biweekly check-in calls.

Outcome: https://qgis.org new site goes live! (Target date end of February 2024)

Phase 3⃣: Auxiliary sites migrations

This is out of scope of the current call for proposals but should be part of the overall planning process:

This would be a collaborative process involving a QGIS funded web developer and the consultant. 

Iterative review and feedback from the QGIS web team should be incorporated from biweekly check in calls.

Outcome: Auxiliary sites goes live with a cohesive look and feel to match the main site.

What we will provide

• Maps and screenshots, videos, animations (with inputs from design team)
• Inputs in terms of content review

Qualification criteria

Payment milestones

10 % Kick off

40 % Phase 1 Completion

50 % Phase 2 Completion

Indicative budget

We would like to point you to the QGIS Annual Budget so that you have a sense of our broad financial means (i.e. we will not be able to afford proposals in excess of €25,000 for phase 1+2).

https://www.qgis.org/en/site/getinvolved/governance/annual_reports/index.html

Technology choices and IP:

• Must be wholly based on Open Source tooling (e.g. javascript, css, web frameworks)
• Needs to be ideally implemented in Hugo (or Sphinx)
• Must produce a static web site (except for existing django based sites)
• Publication and development workflow will follow standard pull request / review process via our GitHub repositories
• Mobile friendly
• Site will be english only – any auto-translation tooling that can be added so that users can trivially see an auto-translated version of the site will be considered favourably.

Proposal submission

Your proposal should consist of no more than 5 pages (include links to relevant annexes if needed) covering the following:

• Overview of yourself / your organization
• Delivery timeline
• Team composition
• Budget for each phase
• Examples of prior work
• Bonus things to mention if relevant: GIS experience & working with Open Source projects

Please send your proposal to [email protected] by October 29nd 2023 midnight, anywhere on earth.

QGIS Server provides numerous services like WMS, WFS, WCS, WMTS and OGC API for Features. These last years, a lot of efforts were made to offer a robust implementation of the WMS 1.3.0 specification.

We are pleased to announce that QGIS Server LTR 3.28 is now certified against WMS 1.3.0.

This formal OGC certification process is performed once a year, specifically for the Long Term Release versions. But, as every change in QGIS source code is now tested against the formal OGC test suites (using OGC TeamEngine) to avoid any kind of regressions, you can always check any revision of the code against OGC failures in our Github continuous integration results.

All this has been possible thanks to the QGIS’s sustaining members and contributors.

After a long hiatus, we are happy to announce that there will be a another international QGIS Contributor Meeting in conjunction with this year’s FOSS4G in Firenze, Italy from 18 to 22 August 2022.

QGIS Contributors Meetings are volunteer-driven events where contributors to the QGIS project from around the world get together in a common space – usually a university campus. The event is normally three days in duration and we hold two such events each year. During these events, contributors to the QGIS project take the opportunity to plan their work, hold face-to-face discussions and present new improvements to the QGIS project that they have been working on. Everybody attending the event donates their time to the project for the days of the event. As a project that is built primarily through online collaboration, these meetings provide a crucial ingredient to the future development of the QGIS project. The event is planned largely as an ‘unconference’ with minimal structured programme planning. We do this to allow attendees the freedom to meet dynamically with those they encounter at the event. Those sessions that are planned are advertised on the event web page and we try to enable remote participation through video conferencing software. Although our hosts are not funded and donate the working space to us, we show our appreciation by making one of our software release’s splash screens in honour of that host, which is a great way to gain exposure of your institution and country to the hundreds of thousands of users that make use of QGIS.

For more details and to sign up, please visit the corresponding wiki page.

This is a public service announcement:

Our developers have discovered a critical issue in QGIS 3.16.12 which may cause plugins to hang on Windows. All users are encouraged to upgrade to 3.16.13

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Megaphone icon made by BomSymbols from www.flaticon.com

Dear QGIS Users

On Friday, 24 September 2021 we will be holding our monthly QGIS Open Day!

Programme

My QGIS. Each of us has a specialty in QGIS and our own workflows and tricks join this months QGIS Openday to learn from each other.

Where to watch

Please see the event wiki page at for all the details of times and links for participation.

Recordings

All of the YouTube live-streamed events will be recorded and made available on the QGIS Open Day Youtube channel.

If you missed the last event, have a look at the excellent contributions by Leonardo Nazareth (Brazil), Victoria Neema (Kenya), and Tim Sutton (Portugal):

(YouTube live streams sometimes take 24 hours to be available for catch-up viewing. Be sure to check back here for updates!)

Code of Conduct

Participants are kindly reminded to please read and observe our QGIS Code of Conduct and Diversity Statement to make these events a great experience for everyone!

• Code of Conduct
• Diversity Statement

Please contact Amy on Twitter @amzenviro or via the Telegram Channel if you have any queries or need help setting up events.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Regards

The QGIS Open Day Organising Team!

Being part of an open community like QGIS is a unique experience. We get to engage with and become friends with people from many different backgrounds and walks of life. Each person brings their unique flavour to the project and helps create something that is more than just the sum of its parts. The QGIS community is blessed enough to also have attracted some of the greatest minds in the Open Source Geospatial community.

Martin Isenburg was one of these great minds – his work on LASTools and making LiDAR data accessible to the world was truly groundbreaking. The .LAS/.LAZ formats for point cloud data have become ubiquitous, supported by virtually all point cloud processing tools in existence.

This week we received the incredibly sad news that Martin is no longer with us. Martin was a regular fixture at QGIS Hackfests, sitting quietly to one side doing incredible things with his plugin that integrates LASTools into QGIS or sharing a stand-up paddleboard outing with fellow QGISers.

Beyond being a gifted software developer, Martin was acutely aware of our impact on the world and its perilous ecological state. Like many in the QGIS community, he cared not only about technology but also about the potential of technology to transform lives and improve the planet and the human condition. With great sadness, we say a last goodbye to Martin Isenburg and wish his loved ones our deepest condolences.

Thank you, Martin, we will miss you.

The QGIS Community

It is with a heavy heart that we announce that on 2021-05-31, our friend and colleague Håvard Tveite has passed away at the age of 59 after a period of illness.

Håvard was a very active member of the QGIS community, providing valuable input to the documentation, developing numerous plugins, and taking care of the QGIS Resources Sharing Repository to name just a few of his contributions.   

Besides his contributions to the QGIS project, Håvard was also an active volunteer in the Norwegian Orienteering Federation and in the International Orienteering Federation Map Commission (more: https://orienteering.sport/norwegian-great-havard-tveite-has-passed-away/)

The QGIS community would like to extend our heartfelt condolences to Håvard’s wife Ingrid and son Nils.  Håvard’s contributions to the QGIS Project will leave a lasting impact on the lives of many people around the world as they benefit from the work he has done on a daily basis.

R.I.P. Håvard

Dear QGIS Users

On Friday, 26 March 2021 we will be holding our monthly QGIS Open Day! What is a QGIS Open Day you may be wondering to yourself? It is an initiative to replace the wonderful community meetups we used to hold every six months when times were different. Like our in-person meetings, the event is organised on the principle of self-organisation and community participation.

Programme

• QGIS INTEGRATED (The open day that shows QGIS working as part of an ecosystem with other software and programs to create dynamic and shareable spatial data, maps, and systems)

Where to watch

Please see the event wiki page at QHF-March-2021 Wiki for all the details of times and links for participation.

Recordings

All of the YouTube live-streamed events will be recorded and made available to users who couldn’t make the live events. YouTube live streams sometimes take 24 hours to be available for catch-up viewing. Be sure to check back here for updates!

Code of Conduct

Participants are kindly reminded to please read and observe our QGIS Code of Conduct and Diversity Statement to make these events a great experience for everyone!

• Code of Conduct
• Diversity Statement

Please contact me, Zinziswa Xakayi by email [email protected] or via the Telegram Channel username @zinzixakayi if you have any queries or need help setting up events.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Regards

The QGIS Open Day Organising Team!

We are running out of space on our server running https://plugins.qgis.org – a sign of success, given the large number of plugins and plugin versions hosted on the platform. On Thursday 28 January at 9am West European Time, we will bring the server offline for a scheduled upgrade to the storage space on the server. We anticipate that the work will be completed within an hour. We thank you for your patience whilst we undertake this critical maintenance.

The maintenance of QGIS infrastructure is undertaken largely by volunteers and the cost of servers and hosting related costs are funded by your donations and sustaining memberships. If you would like to help support this (and the many other excellent initiatives carried out by QGIS.org), please consider heading over to https://qgis.org/en/site/getinvolved/governance/sustaining_members/sustaining_members.html#how-can-you-support-the-qgis-development to find out how you can help!

Dear Community,

2020, as we all know, has been an unusual year. In addition to all the other issues we have all faced, we also had to cancel our beloved hackfests. Since we first started holding bi-annual hackfests in 2009, this will be the first year without an in-person event where our friendly community can meet. 

That can’t be! We are a modern and thriving community based on exchange, discussion and collaboration and should foster this even when physical meetings are not possible.

I’m super excited to announce that after some very motivating discussions on the HackFest telegram channel and in the PSC, starting from next week on every last Friday of each month we will hold an informal online virtual meeting to hack around, document, discuss and in general meet the awesome QGIS community. 

There will normally be no formal agenda, no fixed schedule nor moderators, simply join the QHackFriday (pronounced KwakFriday) jitsi room and say hi! 

I added a page to the wiki, so if you have topics that you like to discuss/present you can put them there and others might join you. 

Stay safe and see you next Friday!

As you may have noticed, the next release version will be 3.14 and therefore, we will call it ‘Pi’.

Usually our versions are named for community meeting locations and the splash screen shows a map related to this location.

For 3.14 we were looking for creative maps that capture the essence of Pi.

Submissions

The submission phase was open for two weeks and we received numerous inspiring submissions:

Public voting

From these submissions, a short list of top 3 candidates was compiled and put up for the public vote:

Candidate #1 Ezequiel Orquera writes about his submission: “As an agronomist, Pi is used every single time that you need to develop a pivot irrigation system (those nice circles we can see on sat. images), making most use of Pi number and the radius. In this image, we can see the circles in contrast with rectangles shapes. The interest thing is that on most of the circles you can see the irrigation system arm that is coming from the center of each circle, making it the radius. Furthermore we all know that Pi x r^2 = circle area. This is useful to estimate for example, crop yields.”

Candidate #2 Francis Josef Gasgonia writes about his submission: “This map would not be complete without the use of Pi. Multicentric ring buffers represent potential danger zones in this map of Mt. Isarog in the Philippines. The calculations necessary to develop the ring buffers depend on Pi. Mt. Isarog is classified as a potentially active stratovolcano. This map best represents the use of Pi in a map because these buffers are crucial in disaster planning, especially now in a Covid-19 pandemic world; wherein ring buffers, and other types of buffers are in use for humanitarian and logistics planning.”

Candidate #3 Michel Stuyts writes about his submission: “Since Pi is very much linked to circles, I looked for the most circular place I could find. The place I made a map of is Vahanga, an atoll in the Pacific Ocean. I decorated the map with angles of a circle in radians as divisions of Pi. Because QGIS splash screens usually show a map of a location where a developer meeting was, the chance it would ever have a map of this part of the world is just as irrational as Pi, because the closest inhabited place is more than a 1000km away. My map is also linked to Corona (the reason there was no dev meeting in the first place), because the atoll is crown shaped and Corona means crown. Besides being linked to Pi and Corona, my map is also very much linked to QGIS, because it’s 100% made with QGIS. The angles in radians where made with “geometry generators” from the central point. The fills where made using “random marker fills” combined with an expression using “randf()” to set the size of the markers with a “Data defined override”. For the shallow water on the inside of the atoll I used a “Shapeburst fill”.“

And the winner is …

In the public vote, Francis Josef Gasgonia’s map received the most votes (46%):

Congratulations Francis and thank you again to everyone who participated in this fun contest to ensure that QGIS 3.14 Pi will have great visuals!

Dear QGIS Community

We recently held our 2020 QGIS Annual General Meeting. The minutes of this meeting are available for all to view.

I would like to welcome our new QGIS Board Chair: Marco Bernasocchi and our new QGIS Board Vice-Chair and QGIS PSC Member, Alessandro Pasotti. In case you are not familiar with Marco and Alessandro, you can find short introductions to them below. I will continue to serve on the PSC and am pleased also to say that the project governance is in good hands with Jürgen Fischer, Andreas Neumann and Anita Graser kindly making themselves available to serve on the PSC for another two years. It is also great to know that our project founder, Gary Sherman, as well as long-term PSC member Tim Sutton continue to serve on the PSC as honorary PSC members. They both set the standard for our great project culture and it is great to have his continued presence.

QGIS has been growing from strength to strength, backed by a really amazing community of kind and collaborative users, developers, contributors and funders. I am looking forward to seeing how it continues to grow and flourish and I am excited and confident it will do so with Marco acting as the project chair and representative. Rock on QGIS!

Marco Bernasocchi (http://berna.io @mbernasocchi)

I am an open source advocate, consultant, teacher and developer. My background is in geography with a specialization in geographic information science. I live in Switzerland in a small Romansh speaking mountain village where I love scrambling around the mountains to enjoy the feeling of freedom it gives me. I’m a very communicative person, I fluently speak Italian, German, French English and Spanish and love travelling.

I work as director of OPENGIS.ch which I founded in 2011. Since 2015 I share the company ownership with Matthias Kuhn. At OPENGIS.ch LLC we (6 superstar devs and myself) develop, train and consult our client on any aspect related to QGIS.

My first QGIS (to be correct for that time QuantumGIS) ever was “Simon (0.6)” during my BSc when the University of Zurich was teaching us proprietary products and I started looking around for Open Source alternatives. In 2008, when starting my MSc, I made the definitive switch to ubuntu and I started working more and more with QGIS Metis (0.11) and ended developing some plugins and part of Globe as my Masters thesis. Since three years the University of Zurich invites me to hold two seminars on Entrepreneurship and Open Source. In November 2011 I attended my first Hackfest in Zürich where I started porting all QGIS dependencies and developing QGIS for Android under a Google Summer of Code. A couple of years and a lot of work later QField was born. Since then I’ve always tried to attend at least to one Hackfest per year to be able to feel first hand the strong bonds within our very welcoming community. In 2013 i was lucky enough to have a release named after a suggestion I saved you all from having QGIS 2.0 – Hönggerberg and giving you instead QGIS 2.0 – Dufour. In 2018 I’ve been honored to be nominated Co-chair of the QGIS PSC, since then I’ve been taking care of GitHub, the user groups, running votes, elections, doing some small work on the website, giving more talks on opensource advocacy and foremost helping in the day to day work needed to help our amazing project keep on growing.

Beside my long story with QGIS as user and passionate advocate I have a long story as QGIS service provider where we are fully committed to its stability, feature richness and sustainable development. For that in 2019 we started our own QGIS sustainability initiative financed through our support contracts.

Alessandro Pasotti (@elpaso https://www.itopen.it, https://www.qcooperative.net)

I am an open source software developer and I live in Italy. By education I’m an agronomist with some topography and pedology background, but I turned to the dark side early in my career and I started programming any kind of device that has a chip inside as soon as their price dropped low enough. I started using Linux in 1994 and after some real work as an R&D data analyst for a big pharmaceutical company I started my own small business that was making map-based web applications for the touristic market (there was no Google Map and such at that time) and it is for this reason that I discovered GRASS, Mapserver, PostGIS and finally QGIS when I needed a GIS viewer.

Over the years I’ve made minor contributions to several open source projects and I created a bunch of QGIS Python plugins, but it is from the QGIS Lisbon Hack-Fest in 2011 that I really got involved within the community and my first big contribution was a new website for the fast growing set of QGIS Python plugins (the one that it is already in production today at https://plugins.qgis.org ).

8 years ago I re-started to write some C++ code and I’m now a QGIS core developer and a proud member of this amazing community.

Regards

Paolo Cavallini (outgoing Chair)

Dear QGIS Community:

Due to the uncertainty caused by rapidly unfolding global events related to the COVID-19 virus, we have decided to cancel all in-person QGIS events until further notice. This includes the 25th QGIS Contributor meeting and User Conference that was scheduled to be held this year in Nødebo, Denmark. In the interim, we will pursue ways to meet virtually from time to time, and of course, continue working using our normal collaboration process via email and GitHub.

Thank you for your understanding,

The QGIS Team

QGIS users who have adopted the 3.10 version when initially released at the end of October 2019 have likely noticed a sharp drop in reliability. The underlying issues have now been addressed in 3.10.2, all users are advised to update *now*.

When QGIS 3.10 was first released in the end of October 2019, a pair of libraries – namely GDAL and PROJ – were updated to their next-generation versions. The advantages are plenty: GeoPDF export[1] support, more accurate coordinate transformation, etc. For those interested, more technical information on this is available here[2].

The update of these crucial libraries led to a number of regressions. While we expected some issues to arise, the seriousness of the disruption caught us off guard. Yet, it was also somewhat inevitable: QGIS is the first large GIS project to expose these next-generation libraries to the masses. The large number of QGIS users across the globe were essentially stress testing both new code within QGIS as well as the libraries themselves.

Thanks to dedicated users taking time to file in report and the community helping out as well as our project sponsors for allowing us to fund development time, developers have been able to fix all known regressions in both in QGIS as well as underlying GDAL and PROJ libraries, benefiting a large number of open source projects.

As a result of this collective effort by the community, QGIS 3.10.2 is now back to being the reliable and stable GIS software we all love. As such, we cannot stress enough the importance of updating now.

Once again, thanks to our community of testers, sponsors, and developers for their countless hours and efforts in making QGIS better.

Happy mapping!

[1] https://north-road.com/2019/09/03/qgis-3-10-loves-geopdf/
[2] https://gdalbarn.com/

We now have signed packages for macOS. You can find these packages published on the official QGIS download page at http://download.qgis.org.

Rationale

In addition to being a very powerful and user-friendly open source GIS application, QGIS can be installed on different operating systems: MS Windows, macOS, various flavours of Linux and FreeBSD. 

Volunteers help with generating the installers for those platforms. The work is highly valuable and the scale of effort put into packaging over the years is often underappreciated. QGIS has also grown significantly over the years and so has its complexity to package relevant libraries and 3rd party tools to the end-users.

QGIS has been packaged on OSX/macOS for many years, making it one of the few GIS applications you can use on this platform. This is largely thanks to the tireless work of William Kyngesburye (https://www.kyngchaos.com/software/qgis/) who has shouldered the task of compiling QGIS and its dependencies and offering them as disk images on the official QGIS website. The packages for each new release are available within days for all supported macOS versions.

Unlike most other operating systems, macOS can only be run on Apple hardware. This is a barrier for developers on other platforms who wish to compile and test their code on macOS. For other platforms, QGIS developers have automated packaging, not only for the major releases but also for daily code snapshots (aka nightly or master builds). Availability of the daily packages has allowed testers to identify platform-specific issues, well before the official release.

Apple also has a system of software signing so that users can verify if the packages are securely generated and signed by the developers. Up until now, signed macOS packages were not available, resulting in users who are installing QGIS needing to go into their security preferences and manually allow the QGIS application to be run. 

A new approach

In October 2018, Lutra Consulting started their work on packaging QGIS for macOS. The work has been based on OSGeo tap on Homebrew. Homebrew is a ‘bleeding edge’ package manager similar to those provided by Gentoo or Arch Linux. The packages by Lutra bundle the various libraries and resources on which QGIS depends into a single QGIS.app application bundle.  The packages were made available in late 2018 for QGIS official releases and master. QGIS Mac users have eagerly tested and reported various issues and the majority of them were resolved in early 2019.

Following the successful launch of the prototype packages and in discussion with other developers, it was agreed to transfer the ownership of the packaging infrastructure and scripts (https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Mac-Packager) to QGIS.org. Using the new infrastructure and OSGeo Apple developers certificate, all QGIS ‘disk images’ (installers) have been available since late May 2019.

What are the main difference between the new installers and the ones offered by Kyngchaos? The new installer offers:

• 3 clicks to install: download, accept Terms & Conditionss, drop to /Application
• All dependencies (Python, GDAL, etc)  are bundled within the disk image
• Signed by OSGeo Apple certificate
• Availability of nightly builds (master)
• Scripts for bundling and packaging are available on a public repository
• Possibility of installing multiple versions (e.g. 3.4 LTR, 3.8 and master) side-by-side

There are some known issues:

• Lack of support for macOS versions earlier than 10.13 (https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Mac-Packager/issues/6)
• Issues with some GRASS modules relient on Python 2.x

For a full list, see: https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Mac-Packager

Further work

We hope that by providing the new installers, macOS users will have a better experience in installing and using QGIS. Ideally, with the availability of nightly builds and being more accessible to new users, more software bugs and issues will be reported and this will help to improve QGIS overall.

Maintaining and supporting macOS costs more compared with other platforms. As QGIS is one of the only viable GIS applications for macOS users in an enterprise environment, we encourage you and your organisation to become a sustaining member to help assure the continued availability and improvement of the macOS packages in the long term.

Future plans

In future we plan to migrate the packaging process to use Anaconda QGIS packages as the source for package binaries. We also would like to integrate macOS builds into the Travis-CI automated testing that happens whenever a new GitHub pull request is submitted so that we can validate that the macOS packages do not get any regressions when new features are introduced.

Conclusion

With this work, we now have nightly builds of the upcoming release (‘master’) branch available for all to use on macOS. We now have signed packages and we have an automated build infrastructure that will help to ensure that macOS users always have ready access to new versions of QGIS as they become available. You can find these packages published on the official QGIS download page at http://download.qgis.org. A huge thanks to the team at Lutra Consulting for taking this much-needed work, and to William Kyngesburye for the many years that he has contributed towards the macOS/OSX QGIS packaging effort!

 

We’re glad to announce that the recorded presentations from our user conference in A Coruña are now available online on the TIB AV-Portal.

Enjoy and thanks to all participants, sponsors and organizers!

 

Currently there are a number of ongoing crowdfunding initiatives for improvements in QGIS that need your support:

1. Diagrams in print layouts, atlas and reports: the popular data plotly plugin for interactive, exploratory charts and diagrams should be enhanced to support embedding in print layouts, atlas serial prints and reports. Details can be found at the North Road campaign website. This is a joint effort of companies Faunalia and North Road. Funding goal: € 8’600 (1’780 collected as of April 2, 2019)

2. Cartography proposal: selective masking of symbol levels behind labels and map symbols. Inspired by the high-quality topographic maps of Swisstopo. Details can be found at the Oslandia campaign website. Funding goal: € 20’000 (8’000 collected as of April 2, 2019)

3. GeoPDF-Export: Export of georeferenced PDF files, with the possibility to measure, query coordinates, toggle map layers and query feature attributes. The project is partitioned into several work packages. This is a joint effort of Even Rouault and North Road on request of several Austrian local government agencies. For more details, please contact Johannes Kanonier of the Landesvermessungsamt Vorarlberg. Funding goal: € 30’800 (24’400 collected as of April 2, 2019)

4. SLYR: Converter for ESRI LYR and MXD-Files. Project is partitioned in several work packages for the conversion of ESRI styles to QGIS styles, MXD-Files into QGIS project files and ESRI layouts to QGIS layouts. Please find more details at the SLYR website of North Road.

Thank you for your support in making these projects a reality!

QGIS 3.4 has recently become our new Long Term Release  (LTR) version. This is a major step in our history – a long term release version based on the massive updates, library upgrades and improvements that we carried out in the course of the 2.x to 3x upgrade cycle.

We strongly encourage all users who are currently using QGIS 2.18 LTR  as their preferred QGIS release to migrate to QGIS 3.4. This new LTR version will receive regular bugfixes for at least one year. It also includes hundreds of new functions, usability improvements, bugfixes, and other goodies. See the relevant changelogs for a good sampling of all the new features that have gone into version 3.4

• QGIS 3.0 Changelog
• QGIS 3.2 Changelog
• QGIS 3.4 Changelog

Most plugins have been either migrated or incorporated into the core QGIS code base.

We strongly discourage the continued use of QGIS 2.18 LTR as it is now officially unsupported, which means we’ll not provide any bug fix releases for it.

You should also note that we intend to close all bug tickets referring to the now obsolete LTR version. Original reporters will receive a notification of the ticket closure and are encouraged to check whether the issue persists in the new LTR, in which case they should reopen the ticket.

If you would like to better understand the QGIS release roadmap, check out our roadmap page! It outlines the schedule for upcoming releases and will help you plan your deployment of QGIS into an operational environment.

The development of QGIS 3.4 LTR has been made possible by the work of hundreds of volunteers, by the investments of companies, professionals, and administrations, and by continuous donations and financial support from many of you. We sincerely thank you all and encourage you to collaborate and support the project even more, for the long term improvement and sustainability of the QGIS project.

In January, we wanted to learn more about if and how QGIS users contribute back to the project. We received 299 responses from all over the world:

55% of responders have contributed to the project in the past:

Responders who stated that they had contributed to QGIS were asked to specify what kind of contributions they had provided. This question was multiple-choice. Time contributions are generally more common than financial contributions. 30% of responders helped by creating reproducible bug reports and 24% implemented improvements themselves. The most common financial contribution are personal donations to QGIS.ORG at 17%.

Membership in user groups, contracting developers / documentation writers / translators, or having a support contract with a QGIS support provider are less common amongst responders:

Responders who stated that they had not contributed to QGIS most commonly stated that they didn’t know how to contribute (26%), while lacking financial resources were only raised by 10% of responders:

New question

This month, we’d like to know which plugins you think should be advertised as “featured” on the official QGIS plugin repository.

The survey is available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Ukrainian, Danish, and Japanese. If you want to help us translate user questions in more languages, please get in touch!