This is literally what I thought when I saw this picture. The sentence makes sense for a French speaker; the English version would be: not mix apples and pears, but I also found apples and oranges. Always happy to learn the usage if you want to comment on our socials.
Anyway, my title is misleading about the subject; the picture shows handkerchiefs from Chris Chambers.
MapsintheWild Do not mix dishcloths and napkins
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My employer, Elastic, has a number of philanthropic initiatives but definitely the one I love the most is the Volunteering Time Off (VTO). We are given 40 hours per year from our working hours to contribute to projects and initiatives we care about. Employees have full freedom to choose what they want to do with that time and are encouraged to use it.
In my case, over this almost 5 years I have to admit I haven’t used all that time every year but I tried to get the most of it. During COVID I did some remote work for a local NGO that works for fair trade, giving them a webinar about Open Source among other things (see update from December 2019 and following months). I also spent a few days working on some admin tasks for the Open Source Geospatial Foundation and I’ve already written here about a couple sessions I did for Cibervoluntarios, training seniors and teens about safe browsing and email.
Last week I was showcased in the company blog, along with other colleagues, on different projects to contribute to. In my case, last year I joined the mapping efforts after the Morocco Earthquake and took a full day mapping roads and streets of a rural area, as part of the coordinated efforts from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team (reported on my October community update). I’m very happy to have this support from my employer to leave things aside when an emergency like this arises, granted there are no other urgent issues at work.
As a personal call to action, I’d love to get back to Cibervoluntarios activities. This year has been quite busy; let’s see after summer if there’s room for getting out and engaging with them.
I know I haven’t updated this site in a while, I’ll write one soon! 😅
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.
Initial analysis of the questions and actions to be quickly answered by qgis.orgGoal 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.
User group and requirements analysis for the potential qgis.org visitorsGoal 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.
The universal menu bar 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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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
This is a follow up to 2024 roadmap post outlining development opportunities.
First of all thanks to developers and organisations that have responded with offers of in-kind contributions. This blog post is assessing current progress and outlines a way forward to complete the Java 17/Jakarta EE/Spring 6 upgrades.
This post highlights development activities that are available to be worked on today, along with interested developers and commercial support providers available to work on GeoServer roadmap items.
The key challenge we are building towards is a spring-framework 6 update, ideally by the end of 2024 when the version we use now reaches end-of-life.
The tasks below are steps towards this goal.
Interested Parties:
Activity:
Spring Security 5.8 provides a safe stepping stone ahead of the complete spring-framework 6 upgrade and is an activity that can be worked on immediately.
Interested parties:
Activity:
The spring-security-oauth client has reached end-of-life and a GeoServer OAuth2 support must be rewritten or migrated as a result.
There are two paths to migrate to spring-security-core implementation:
Option: Migrate the existing community module implementations to spring-security-core in place; with as little loss of functionality as possible. This has the advantage of using existing test coverage to maintain a consistent set of functionality during migration.
Option: Setup a community module alongside the existing implementation with the goal of making a full supported etension. This approach has the advantages of allowing organisations the ability to do A/B testing as both the old and new implementation would be available alongside each other. This has the advantage of allowing stakeholders to only fund, implement, test functionality as required without disrupting existing use.
Security integrations often require infrastructure to develop and test against, which the core GeoServer team does not have access to for automated tests. We would like to see organisations review their security integration requirements and be on hand to support this development activity.
The initial priority will support for OAuth2 and Open ID Connect (OIDC), parties interested in maintaining support for Google, GeoNode, GitHub are welcome to participate.
Interested Parties:
Activity: not started
The image processing library used by GeoServer has been donated to the open source community under the name ImageN.
The immediate goal has been to add test cases to this codebase and make an ImageN 1.0 release. Andrea has come up with the amazing idea of integrating with JAI-Ext project immediately, to benefit from the improved operators, and jumpstart test coverage.
Interested Parties:
We would like to see organisations that depend on GeoServer for earth observation and imagery to step forward with funding for this activity.
Thus far 2024 has not had a strong enough sponsorship response to support the project goals above. As a point of comparison we established a budget of $15,000 with OSGeo last year to take on an low-level API change that affected several projects.
This year GeoServer sponsorship has raised between $1,000 and $2,000 which is not enough to plan with or coordinate in-kind contributions offered thus far.
Jody has worked with the OSGeo board to make adjustments to the sponsorship:
We would like to thank everyone who has responded thus far:
by Luca Congedo (noreply@blogger.com) at July 21, 2024 11:00 AM
I found this nice geo license plate walking by the River Thames. Very geo-nerdy. Happy Sunday!
MapsintheWild Which projection is this?
by Luca Congedo (noreply@blogger.com) at July 20, 2024 01:41 PM
by Ian Turton (noreply@blogger.com) at July 19, 2024 12:27 PM
