Geopublisher and AtlasStyler 1.3 released

After four months of development, we today release version 1.3 of Geopublisher and AtlasStyler as the new stable release. A general overview of Geopublisher has already been given in an earlier post, so this post is just summarizing some of the new features that ship with this release.

New features in Geopublisher 1.3:

Bugfixes: Geopublisher 1.3 now comes with a 72h bugfix guarantee! If you find & report a bug, we promise to look for a solution within 72h!

More flexible column meta-data management: You may now also configure the order of attributes that should be visible to the atlas user. The whole dialog for attribute meta-data has been rewritten and is more user-friendly now:

Automatic generation of spatial index files for Shapefiles: In earlier versions of Geopublisher, users reported problems when they changed Shapefiles after they had been imported into GP, because many GIS don't update the spatial index files automatically. Geopublisher 1.3 now checks the spatial index files (.qix) of all Shapefiles and recreates them in the background if they are out-of-date.

Better rendering feedback: Geopublisher and AtlasStyler now give the user feedback about non-critical rendering problems and show them as warning messages in the map. This way it is easier to identify problems like broken geometry in your data. The exported atlases do hide these warning messages, so atlas end-users will not be bothered with this non-critical information:

Attribute name validation: Geopublisher automatically checks any attribute name used (e.g. in SLD or filter) for validity against the schema. The motivation for this emerged from the problem that some DBF editors change the attribute names all to lower-case, others change them all to upper-case. If your attribute names change after they have been imported into your atlas, Geopublisher will now try to find the best match automatically and update all references. You may also move, add or remove attribute columns after a dataset has been imported into your atlas without expecting any problems. 

Selection synchronization: Selections in the map, the attribute table and the statistics charts are now all synchronized. Hence you may select outlier points in a chart and see the geometry highlighted in the map and attribute table.

Statistics module: You may configure various kinds of charts on your data using a user-friendly wizard. You can publish them as interactive charts as part of your atlas:

Expect a dedicated tutorial on the chart wizard in January 2010.

More labelling options: The labelling options dialog has been improved and now allows to make your maps look even nicer. A dedicated tutorial has been released last month, and is now available in English and French.

New map pane component: A rewrite of the map visualization component provides faster map browsing and prepares the infrastructure needed to add background maps like OpenStreetMap or GoogleEarth (wait for the next release of GP).

More OGC compatibility: We replaced our filter language with the official OGC Common Query Language standard. This ensures more compatibility with other GIS-applications. Older atlases will automatically be upgraded to the new filter language.

Other news:

At the end of October Geopublishing.org presented a poster about Geopublisher at the ISPRS Data Management Workshop in Cologne. Where we also learned about the very promising Pangea project: An approach to motivate more scientists to publish their geo-data by making it citable and reviewable in scientific journals.

French web-page: Since Geopublisher and AtlasStyler are fully localized in French, German and English, we thought the web-page should be too. By the time of writing, we are gradually translating the top ten pages to French. In a few days check out http://fr.geopublishing.org.

And last but not least we registered with a presentation and a poster about Geopublisher and AtlasStyler for the FOSSGIS conference 2010 in Osnabrück. So we hope to see you there!