The forum (http://forum.qgis.org) has been closed for new registrations and marked read-only. Users have been encouraged to use http://gis.stackexchange.com instead. If you have an thoughts on the closure, good, bad, or otherwise, please comment.

The Plugin Builder allows you to quickly create a skeleton Python plugin by generating all that boring boilerplate that every plugin requires. Here is a short video showing how to create, compile, and install a new plugin. For more information, see QGIS Workshop Documentation and the PyQGIS Cookbook.

Take a look at: The Volcano and the Buffer It includes an example that uses CSV, GDAL/OGR VRT, QGIS, and fTools to figure out if I was in danger of being buried in a volcanic ash fall (not much danger but sounds dramatic).

This week we highlight the Points to Paths plugin, a handy way to convert a series of points into line features. This plugin lets you “connect the dots” based on an common attribute and a sequence field. The attribute field determines which points should be grouped together into a line. The sequence field determines the order in which the points will connected. The output from this plugin is a shapefile.

In a recent post on VerySpatial.com, Jesse was discussing the apparent dominance of U*nix and observed: ‘…the geospatial industry almost completely left behind support for UNIX-like OSes’ It is true that the proprietary GIS vendors have largely abandoned Unix and Unix-like operating systems and continue to do so. However the open source GIS community has embraced all major operating systems with software that runs on Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X, and yes, Windows.

I’ve come to the conclusion that storing rasters in a database is of dubious value, particularly from a data warehouse perspective. If you manage a collection of rasters that are updated on a frequent basis, storing them in a relational database with ArcSDE quickly becomes a pain. I’m not talking about a dozen or so rasters, but rather tens of thousands. The overhead of the database and middleware just doesn’t seem to be worth it.

One of the difficult things to track in the open source world is the number of people who actually use your software. In the proprietary commercial world you have licenses, invoices, and so forth. In the case of QGIS, we can track the total number of downloads from qgis.org, but this doesn’t represent the total installed base. It is impossible to accurately determine the actual number of people using QGIS, but we can get an approximation of the number and where they are in the world.

I added a simple feature that allows you to search the IRC logs from #qgis back to May 10, 2006. The search is case sensitive and will return a list of all matches. Not too smart but it will get you close to what you want. See the link at http://irclogs.geoapt.com/qgis

Everybody who gets an Eee PC has to write about it–it’s required. I don’t really have much to add to the raft of reviews, except for one small point. I found myself wanting to print something and, based on my last experience, prepared for the ordeal of setting up a printer. I about fell out of the chair when I opened the Printer configuration and found that the Eee had already found the CUPS printer on my network and added it.

Well it was a short summer here. Or perhaps we have defeated global warming. This is the view from the deck on Thursday evening: and this is the view Saturday morning: Of course nearly everyone in the country has removed their snow tires in anticipation of the upcoming May 1 deadline. As they say “Life is tough in the far north”. The good news is that now we can go directly from winter to summer…

QGIS has a lot of plugins, including over 180 that have been contributed by users. If you aren’t using plugins, you are missing out on a lot that QGIS has to offer. I’m starting what I hope to be a regular feature: Plugin of the Week. This week we’ll take a look at Time Manager. Time Manager lets you browse spatial data that has a temporal component. Essentially this includes anything that changes location through time.

An interesting visualization of QGIS development over the last eight years: http://woostuff.wordpress.com/2011/01/03/generating-a-gource-source-commit-history-visualization-for-qgis-quantum-gis/

I guess Ubuntu must be popular. I’m just trying to upgrade my Feisty install so I can do the upgrade to Gutsy. Looks like it’s going to take a while…

QgisToMapServer converts a saved QGIS project file to a map file, ready to be served with MapServer. A binary preview version for both Mac and Windows is available now. For Linux/Unix users, the source code is available from the Git repository. QgisToMapServer is different from the plugin in QGIS. It is a standalone Python application providing the following features: Create MapServer map files from saved QGIS project files Preview the map file (requires shp2img)

One of the hurdles in developing a QGIS plugin with Python is just getting the basics down. Getting the plugin setup so it is recognized by QGIS and properly adds it’s menu and toolbar items can be a bit of a chore, especially the first time. To make the process easier, I put together a web tool to generate a plugin that can be used as a starting point. The tool creates a fully functional plugin that can be loaded in QGIS 1.

Nominations for the QGIS PSC closed at 00:00 UTC on August 25, 2013 [1]. With only one nominee for each role, the PSC unanimously moved to accept each without election. The QGIS PSC welcomes new members Anita Graser, Richard Duivenvoorde, and Jürgen Fischer. The PSC is now composed of: Chair - Gary Sherman Community Advisor - Otto Dassau Design Advisor - Anita Graser Financial and Marketing Advisor - Paolo Cavallini

The QGIS Project Steering Committee (PSC) has announced a call for nominations to fill three vacant positions: Design Advisor Infrastructure Manager Release Manager Nominations are open until August 24, 2013. For details on the PSC, vacancies, and how to nominate someone, see the Call for Nominations August 2013.

$ uptime 20:20:56 up 434 days, 15:31, 2 users, load average: 2.32, 0.89, 0.53

Looks like the ink is dry on Desktop GIS and it should start shipping soon. You can get the full scoop from the Pragmatic Bookshelf. Update: It’s now shipping. See the announcement.

Using the git log leading up to the 1.7 release (June 2011) I put together a graphic that shows the growth of committers working on the project. In 2002 we had two people (me alone up until October). You can see significant jumps in developer interest in 2004 and 2008: In 2004 there were a number of releases that added significant functionality Following an announcement at FOSS4G 2007 in Victoria we released 0.