We are very pleased to announce the release of QGIS 1.8.0 'Lisboa', the next in our development release series. This release contains new features and extends the programmatic interface over QGIS 1.0.x and QGIS 1.7.0.

Binary and source code packages are available at:

http://download.qgis.org

If there is not yet a package for your platform on the above page, please check back regularly as packagers are still pushing out their work and they will update the download page to reflect the new packages. Along with the release of QGIS 1.8.0, the QGIS Community Team is hard at work on an updated QGIS Users' Guide version 1.8.0. The guide will be available in the near future - we will post announcements when it is available.

QGIS is a completely volunteer driven project, and is the work of a dedicated team of developers, documenters and supporters. We extend our thanks and gratitude for the many, many hours people have contributed to make this release happen. We would also like to thank our sponsors and donors for helping to promote our work through their financial contributions.

 

Our current sponsors:

Silver sponsor: State of Vorarlberg, Austria (11.2011)
Bronze sponsor: www.argusoft.de, Germany (6.2012)	Bronze sponsor: www.geosynergy.com.au, Australia (5.2012)
Bronze sponsor: ibW Bildungszentrum Wald, Switzerland (3.2012)	Bronze sponsor: City of Uster, Switzerland (11.2011)

A full list of sponsors and donors can be seen here:

http://qgis.org/en/sponsorship/sponsors.html

http://qgis.org/en/sponsorship/donors.html

 

If you would like to make a donation or sponsor our project, please visit http://www.qgis.org/en/sponsorship.html . QGIS is Free software and you are under no obligation to do so.

 

 

About the new release

This is a new feature release. Building on the foundation of QGIS 1.7.x releases, Lisboa introduces many new features, improvements and bug fixes. Here is a visual summary of some of the key new features.

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.

Drag and drop layers with QGIS Browser

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