QGIS 2.8 LTR has landed

It’s finally here! QGIS 2.8 LTR “Wien” is officially available for download now.

What’s an LTR

LTR stands for “Long Term Release”. This means that QGIS now has a system in place to provide a one-year stable release with backported bug fixes. The idea behind LTR is to have a stable platform for enterprises and organizations that don’t want to update their software and training materials more often than once a year. To make the LTR a success, users and developers alike should be aware that bug fixes should be applied to both the LTR branch as well as the normal development branch. If you are interested in the details, you can find more info in the corresponding QGIS Enhancement Proposal.

Users who enjoy working with the cutting-edge version will be able to follow the regular four-monthly release cycle like last year.

What’s new?

This new version comes with many great new features which you can explore in the official visual changelog. It’s really hard to pick but my personal favorites are:

On the layer styling front, there are two great additions: raster image fills and a live heatmap renderer which makes it possible to create dynamic heatmaps on the fly.

Raster image fill symbol layer type

Another feature I’m sure many of you will enjoy is the support for custom prefixes for joins.

Custom join prefixes

Last but not least, I want to point your attention to the great improvements to the rule-based legend which is now structured in a nice tree.

Rule-based renderer legend tree

Don’t forget to check out the other new features!

Thanks!

None of this would have been possible without the great QGIS community and all the many different people involved in running the project. Thanks a lot to all of you and a special shout out for the sponsors! *applause*