On Eenvoudige PDOK services plugin voor QGIS (in Dutch) Richard already described how to use the PDOK plugin to connect to webservices of the Dutch PDOK infrastructure. This infrastructure offers nationwide and publicly available WMS, WFS and some tiling services of Dutch governments. This video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjLG4KtpdYk shows how to use the plugin to create a [...]

1. Since the release of QGIS 1.8, Plugin Installer no longer includes the “add 3rd party repositories” button. This was an intentional design choice!
2. The new official plugin repository at plugins.qgis.org keeps everything in one place making it easier for users to find documentation and report issues. It will also provide many long-wanted features such as a rating system for plugins. You can already sort by number of downloads to discover the most popular plugins.
3. Last but not least: New users will not be able to discover your plugin if it is not in the repository.

Go ahead to plugins.qgis.org and upload your plugin now!

Gary Sherman has just published a new Python plugin for QGIS that I think people will find very handy, I know I will.  The plugin allows you to run Python scripts inside QGIS for tasks that don’t really require, or warrant, a whole plugin.

Go check out Gray’s post about the new plugin at http://spatialgalaxy.net/2012/01/29/script-runner-a-plugin-to-run-python-scripts-in-qgis/

The new plugin can be installed via the Plugin Installer using the “runner” or “script”.  The Plugin Installer is another one of my favorite plugins for QGIS, being able to push out a new plugin and know that everyone can get it is a good feeling :)

“Rectangles ovals digitizing” plugin by Pavol Kapusta adds editing tools that make it really easy to create rectangles, squares, circles and ellipses. These are the tools provided by the new plugin:

Tools in "Rectangles ovals digitizing"

Give it a try!

For everyone working with spatial databases in QGIS there comes a time when “Add PostGIS/SpatiaLite Layer” and “RT Sql Layer” start to be annoying. You always have to retype or copy-paste your SQL queries into the user interface if you need to change the tiniest thing in the layer’s definition.

This is where “Fast SQL Layer” can be a real time saver. Fast SQL Layer is a new plugin for QGIS by Pablo T. Carreira. It basically adds an SQL console for loading layers from PostGIS/SpatiaLite into QGIS. And it even comes with syntax highlighting!

Installation

Fast SQL Layer comes with one dependency: Pygments, which is used for syntax highlighting.

On Ubuntu, all you have to do is install it with apt-get:

sudo apt-get install python-pygments

For Windows with OSGeo4W, @Mike_Toews posted this on gis.stackexchange:

I downloaded and extracted Pygments-1.4.tar.gz, then in an OSGeo4W shell within the Pygments-1.4 directory, type python setup.py build then python setup.py install

Usage

When you activate the plugin in plugin manager, a dock widget will appear which contains the console and some fields for specifying the database connection that should be used. Then, you can simply write your SQL query and load the results with one click.

Fast SQL plugin

In this example, I renamed “gid” to “id”, but you can actually edit the values in the drop down boxes to adjust the column names for id and geometry:

A second layer loaded using Fast SQL plugin

It certainly needs some polishing on the user interface side but I really like it.

A short visit and 7 hours train ride to the OpenLayers code sprint mainly for a presentation at the Swiss MapFish user group meeting in Lausanne, resulted in a new release of the QGIS OpenLayers plugin. The OpenLayers plugin adds WebKit based layers to QGIS and ships with OpenStreetMap-, Google- and Yahoo-Layers.

Changes in this release:

• Update to OpenLayers trunk
• Google Layers using API V3 (no API key necessary)
• Code refactoring for adding new layer types with one line of code (and some HTML…)

The next planned step is integrating this plugin with the very nice Openlayers Overview plugin from Luiz Motta.

Information for adding your own layers and a bug tracker is now available at hub.qgis.org/projects/openlayers

If you ever need to sort the entries in a shapefile by one of its attributes, you might be happy to learn that somebody already did all the work for you and wrote a plugin for QGIS that can perform such sorting tasks: MMQGIS Sort plugin by Michael Minn

MMQGIS Sort plugin

The Sunday night session of the QGIS hackfest resulted in a new release of the Mapfile Tools plugin.

This QGIS plugin allows you to display an UMN Mapserver mapfile in QGIS without running a Mapserver instance. It depends only on Mapscript (apt-get install python-mapscript on Debian/Ubuntu) and allows you to zoom and pan on the mapfile layer.

In release 0.6, an output window has been added, which shows error messages and detailed layer information. This makes it a convenient tool to test your mapfiles.