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QGIS Changelog

What's new in QGIS 2.8.1-1

Mar 9, 2015
  • This is the change log for the next release of QGIS - version 2.8 ‘ Wien’. Wien is German for ‘Vienna’ - host city to our developer meet up in November 2009 and again in March 2014.
  • Long Term Release
  • This is a special release since it is designated an ‘LTR’ (Long Term Release). LTR releases will be supported with backported bug fixes for one year, and will be in permanent feature freeze (i.e. no new features will be added, only bug fixes and trivial updates).
  • The purpose of LTR releases is to provide a stable and less frequently changing platform for enterprises and organisations that do not want to deal with updating user skills, training materials etc. more than once per year. The success of the LTR is very much down to you, our beloved users - we need your support to help funding bug fixes and making sure in your support contracts with support providers specify that any bug fixes done on your behalf are applied to the LTR branch as well as our normal development branch.
  • If an LTR is important to you, please consider also directly supporting the QGIS project, or encourage your commercial provider to use LTR as a basis for your enterprise solution so that everyone may benefit from a stable platform that is being continuously improved and refined. Note that for users and organisations that like to live on the frontier, our regular four monthly releases will continue unabated.
  • New Features
  • QGIS 2.8 is also a special release because it includes so many great new features, tweaks and enhancements to make the most popular Free desktop GIS even more feature filled and useful.
  • Whenever new features are added to software they introduce the possibility of new bugs - if you encounter any problems with this release, please file a ticket on the QGIS Bug Tracker.
  • We would like to thank the developers, documenters, testers and all the many folks out there who volunteer their time and effort (or fund people to do so).
  • From the QGIS community we hope you enjoy this release! If you wish to donate time, money or otherwise get involved in making QGIS more awesome, please wander along to qgis.org and lend a hand!
  • Finally we would like to thank our official sponsors for the invaluable financial support they provide to this project:
  • GOLD Sponsor: Asia Air Survey, Japan http://www.asiaairsurvey.com/
  • SILVER Sponsor: Sourcepole AG, Switzerland
  • SILVER Sponsor: State of Vorarlberg, Austria
  • SILVER Sponsor: Office of Public Works, Ireland, Ireland
  • BRONZE Sponsor: GIS3W, Italy
  • BRONZE Sponsor: www.molitec.it, Italy
  • BRONZE Sponsor: www.argusoft.de, Germany
  • BRONZE Sponsor: www.openrunner.com, France
  • BRONZE Sponsor: GKG Kassel,(Dr.-Ing. Claas Leiner), Germany
  • BRONZE Sponsor: Customer Analytics, USA
  • BRONZE Sponsor: Urbsol, Australia
  • BRONZE Sponsor: MappingGIS, Spain
  • BRONZE Sponsor: Lutra Consulting, UK
  • BRONZE Sponsor: ADLARES GmbH, Germany
  • BRONZE Sponsor: Avioportolano Italia, Italy
  • BRONZE Sponsor: Faculty of Geology, Geophysics and Environmental Protection, AGH, ​University of Science and Technology, Poland
  • A current list of donors who have made financial contributions large and small to the project can be seen on our donors list. If you would like to become an official project sponsor, please visit our sponsorship page for details. Sponsoring QGIS helps us to fund our six monthly developer meetings, maintain project infrastructure and fund bug fixing efforts.
  • If you enjoy using QGIS, please consider making a donation to support the project - either financial or of your time and skills! Lastly we would like to also take a moment to encourage you to fund a special campaign by one of our QGIS developers to get a working test suite for QGIS so that we can improve out quality assurance process and deliver you the best possible releases.
  • QGIS is Free software and you are under no obligation to pay anything to use it - in fact we want to encourage people far and wide to use it regardless of what your financial or social status is - we believe empowering people with spatial decision making tools will result in a better society for all of humanity.

New in QGIS 2.6.0-1 (Nov 3, 2014)

  • GENERAL:
  • Feature: Project filename in properties
  • Feature: Allow removing last point while measuring via del/backspace keys
  • Feature: select related feature on the canvas from the relation reference widget
  • Feature: Editor widgets
  • Feature: Optionally use just a subset of fields from the joined layer
  • Feature: Expression field (virtual fields)
  • Feature: Actions can now have an associated icon
  • Feature: Additional expressions types and options
  • Feature: Classes within graduated and categorised renderers can be toggled
  • Feature: Legend improvements
  • DATA PROVIDERS:
  • Feature: DXF export improvements
  • MAP COMPOSER:
  • Feature: Control over hiding print composer items from prints/exports
  • Feature: Control over page printing for empty composer frames
  • Feature: Item tree panel
  • Feature: More control over appearance of composer arrow/line items
  • Feature: Data defined control of composer items
  • Feature: Composer images can be specifed as remote URLS
  • Feature: Composer Table improvements
  • Feature: Composer improvements
  • Feature: Improved item snapping
  • Feature: Multiple overviews for a map item
  • Feature: HTML item improvements
  • Feature: Composer map grid improvements
  • PROCESSING:
  • Feature: On-line collection of models and scripts
  • Feature: New modeler implementation
  • PROGRAMMABILITY:
  • Feature: API changes for QGIS widgets
  • QGIS SERVER:
  • Feature: Enhancements of searching with GetFeatureInfo request
  • Feature: Add a precision setting for GetFeatureInfo geometry attributes
  • SYMBOLOGY:
  • Feature: Better random colour choice
  • Feature: Symbology user interface improvements
  • User Interface
  • Feature: Syntax highlighting code editor
  • Feature: Color palettes
  • Feature: New color picker dialog
  • Feature: Single select feature tool merged into select by rectangle
  • Feature: Add layer to map canvas behaviour
  • Feature: Add icon size 48 and 64
  • Feature: New colour buttons
  • Feature: Context menu for identify tool

New in QGIS 1.8.0 (May 28, 2013)

  • QGIS Browser: a stand alone app and a new panel in QGIS. The browser lets you easily navigate your file system and connection based (PostGIS, WFS etc.) datasets, preview them and drag and drop items into the canvas.
  • DB Manager: the DB manager is now officially part of QGIS core. You can drag layers from the QGIS Browser into DB Manager and it will import your layer into your spatial database. Drag and drop tables between spatial databases and they will get imported. You can use the DB Manager to execute SQL queries against your spatial database and then view the spatial output for queries by adding the results to QGIS as a query layer. You can also create, edit, delete, and empty tables, and move them to another schema.
  • Importing a layer into a database between QGIS Browser and DB Manager.
  • Importing a layer into a SpatiaLite database from a PostGIS database in DB Manager.
  • New symbol layer types: Line Pattern Fill, Point Pattern Fill.
  • Examples of point and line fills.
  • Terrain Analysis Plugin: a new core plugin was added for doing terrain analysis - and it can make really good looking colored relief maps.
  • Colored relief map created with the new plugin.
  • Ellipse renderer: a new symbol layer type to render ellipse shapes (and also rectangles, triangles, crosses) by specifying width and height. Moreover, the symbol layer allows you to set all parameters (width, height, colors, rotation, outline with) from data fields, in mm or map units.
  • Examples of symbols that can be rendered.
  • Support for nesting projects within other projects: embed content from other project files.
  • The menu item to embed content.
  • Select content from another project in this dialog.
  • Layer grouping: Option to add layers to selected or active group.
  • The new, convenient layer grouping method.
  • Message log: Lets you keep an eye on the messages QGIS generates during loading and operation.
  • New message log window.
  • Customization: Allows setting up simplified QGIS interface by hiding various components of main window and widgets in dialogs.
  • The list of elements to select from.
  • Action Tool: accessible from the map tools toolbar. It allows you to click on a vector feature and execute an action.
  • Configure an action
  • Activate the action tool and click on a feature ...
  • to execute the action.
  • New scale selector: select from a list of predefined scales
  • Select a predefined scale, or enter your own as before.
  • Pan To Selected tool: Pans the map to selected feature(s); does not change the zoom level.
  • The toolbar icon for the new tool.
  • Copy and paste styles between layers
  • The menu item to copy a style.
  • Updated CRS selector dialog
  • The new dialog.
  • New plugin repository: Note that the old repository is now no longer supported by default; plugin authors are kindly requested to move their plugins to the new repository.
  • The new repository's pretty (inter)face!
  • Legend-independent drawing order: The order seen in the legend can be different from the display order. This allows you to order your layers in order of importance, for example, but to still display them in the correct order.
  • The new layer order list is optional. Checking the "control rendering order" box underneath the list of layers will cause a revert to default behavior.
  • Other noteworthy changes with this release:
  • Action Tool - now there is a tool on the map tools toolbar that will allow you to click on a vector feature and execute an action.
  • MSSQL Spatial Support - you can now connect to your Microsoft SQL Server spatial databases using QGIS.
  • Composers - have multiple lines on legend items using a specified character
  • Expression based labelling
  • Heatmap tool - a new core plugin has been added for generating raster heatmaps from point data. You may need to activate this plugin using the plugin manager.
  • GPS Tracking - The GPS live tracking user interface was overhauled and many fixes and improvements were added to it.
  • Menu Re-organisation - The menus were re-organised a little - we now have separate menus for Vector and Raster and many plugins were updated to place their menus in the new Vector and Raster top level menus.
  • Offset Curves - a new digitising tool for creating offset curves was added.
  • Option to add layers to selected or active group
  • New tools in Vector menu - densify geoemtries, Build spatial index
  • Export/add geometry column tool can export info using layer CRS, project CRS or ellipsoidal measurements
  • Model/view based tree for rules in rule-based renderer
  • Improvements in Spatial Bookmarks
  • Plugin metadata in metadata.txt
  • Refactored postgres data provider: support for arbitrary key (including non-numeric and multi column), support for requesting a certain geometry type and/or srid in QgsDataSourceURI
  • Added gdal_fillnodata to GDALTools plugin
  • Support for PostGIS TopoGeometry datatype
  • Python bindings for vector field symbol layer and general updates to the python bindings.
  • Benchmark program
  • Row cache for attribute table
  • UUID generation widget for attribute table
  • Added support of editable views in SpatiaLite databases
  • Expression based widget in field calculator
  • Creation of event layers in analysis lib using linear referencing
  • Load/save layer style (new symbology) from/to SLD document
  • WFS support in QGIS Server
  • Option to skip WKT geometry when copying from attribute table
  • Support for zipped and gzipped layers
  • Test suite now passes all tests on major platforms and nightly tests
  • Set tile size for WMS layers

New in QGIS 1.6.0-1 (Dec 21, 2010)

  • General Improvements:
  • Added gpsd support to live gps tracking.
  • A new plugin has been included that allows for offline editing.
  • Field calculator will now insert NULL feature value in case of calculation error instead of stopping and reverting calculation for all features.
  • Allow user specific PROJ.4 search paths and update srs.db to include grid reference.
  • Added a native (C++) raster calculator implementation which can deal with large rasters efficiently.
  • Improved interaction with extents widget in statusbar so that the text contents of the widget can be copied and pasted.
  • Many improvements and new operators to the vector attribute table field calculator including field concatenation, row counter etc.
  • Added --configpath option that overrides the default path (~/.qgis) for user configuration and forces QSettings to use this directory, too. This allows users to e.g. carry QGIS installation on a flash drive together with all plugins and settings.
  • Experimental WFS-T support. Additionally ported wfs to network manager.
  • Georeferencer has had many tidy ups and improvements.
  • Support for long int in attribute dialog and editor.
  • The QGIS Mapserver project has been incorporated into the main SVN repository and packages are being made available. QGIS Mapserver allows you to serve your QGIS project files via the OGC WMS protocol. Read More
  • Select and measure toolbar flyouts and submenus.
  • Support has been added for non-spatial tables (currently OGR, delimited text and PostgreSQL providers). These tables can be used for field lookups or just generally browsed and edited using the table view.
  • Added search string support for feature ids ($id) and various other search related improvements.
  • Added reload method to map layers and provider interface. Like this, caching providers (currently WMS and WFS) can synchronize with changes in the datasource.
  • Table of contents (TOC) improvements
  • Added a new option to the raster legend menu that will stretch the current layer using the min and max pixel values of the current extent.
  • When writing shape files using the table of contents context menu's 'Save as' option, you can now specify OGR creation options.
  • In the table of contents, it is now possible to select and remove several layers at once.
  • Labelling (New generation only):
  • Data defined label position in labeling-ng.
  • Line wrapping, data defined font and buffer settings for labeling-ng.
  • Layer properties and symbology
  • Three new classification modes added to graduated symbol renderer (version 2), including Natural Breaks (Jenks), Standard Deviations, and Pretty Breaks (based on pretty from the R statistical environment). Read More
  • Improved loading speed of the symbol properties dialog.
  • Data-defined rotation and size for categorized and graduated renderer (symbology-ng).
  • Use size scale also for line symbols to modify line width.
  • Replaced raster histogram implementation with one based on Qwt. Added option to save histogram as image file. Show actual pixel values on x axis of raster histogram.
  • Added ability to interactively select pixels from the canvas to populate the transparency table in the raster layer properties dialog.
  • Allow creation of color ramps in vector color ramp combo box.
  • Added "style manager..." button to symbol selector so that users will find the style manager more easily.

New in QGIS 1.3.0-3 (Nov 18, 2009)

  • This release includes over 30 bug fixes and enhancements over the QGIS 1.2.0 release.
  • OSM plugin & provider updates:
  • new OSM style files.
  • new icons.
  • dialog text updated and completed.
  • Saving OSM into file functionality was improvements.
  • fixed some problems with encoding... ascii to utf-8.
  • all OSM layers are automatically removed after disabling OSM plugin in plugin manager.
  • other OSM related bugfixes.
  • Other notable features and improvements in this release:
  • Marker size is now configurable when editing a layer.
  • Incorporation of the analysis library into the mainstream release.
  • Identify features across multiple layers.
  • Added a new plugin for carrying out raster terrain analysis (computing slope aspect, steepness etc).
  • A reshape tool to apply to line/polygon geometries. The part of a geometry between the first and last intersection of the reshape line will be replaced.
  • Added snapping to current layer in measure dialog.
  • Added ability to select the primary key for views.
  • Zoom to a coordinate by entering it in the status bar coordinate display.