1. 🚀 Project Overview
2. 📊 QGIS Analytics Dashboard
3. 🚥 QA Status
4. 📖 User Guide
5. 📜 License
6. 📂 Folder Structure
7. 🤖 Using 'AI' (Large Language Models)
8. 🛠️ Tech Stack
9. 🗄️ Data Model
10. 🧊 Using the Nix Shell
11. ✨ Contributing
12. 🙋 Have Questions?
13. 🧑‍💻👩‍💻 Contributors

When a user opens QGIS, their application sends a request to https://feed.qgis.org. The server processes each request and extracts only three key pieces of information:

1. Date (rounded to the nearest day)
2. QGIS Version (the version code of the software)
3. Country (determined from the IP address, but the IP itself is not stored)
4. Operating System (platform string)

This information is then aggregated hourly into three separate tables:

• Daily Country Table:

  • Columns: date, country ISO code, number of hits
  • Example: 2024-06-10, DE, 1200

• Daily QGIS Version Table:

  • Columns: date, QGIS version, number of hits
  • Example: 2024-06-10, 3.34.0, 800

• Daily Platform Table:

  • Columns: date, OS platform, number of hits
  • Example: 2024-06-10, Windows, 900

Each table records the count of requests (hits) for each unique value per day.

• No IP Addresses Stored: The server uses the IP address only to determine the country. The IP is immediately discarded and never stored.

• No Persistent Identifiers: No user IDs, device IDs, or other persistent identifiers are collected or stored.

• Aggregation: Data is stored only as counts per day, per country/version/platform. There is no way to trace data back to an individual user.

• Rate Limiting:

  • Only one hit per IP per hour is counted.
  • Only one opening per day is recorded per user (even if they open/close QGIS multiple times).

• No personal or device information is stored.
• No sharing with third parties.
• Data is only used in aggregate for analytics.

• Users behind NAT or managed networks may be undercounted.
• Users who disable the news feed are not counted.
• Only one hit per IP per hour/day, so heavy users are not overrepresented.

A home page that displays feeds as they are rendered in QGIS is now available at the root of the web server /. Feeds are filterable using the filter widget on the left side. You can directly pass the filter parameters in the url according to the section Available parameters for filters in Endpoint and accepted parameters

Note: When calling the root url from QGIS, the response data is in JSON format. See the section Response data for QGIS in the Endpoint and accepted parameters

Users with staff flag can enter the control panel at /admin and add feed entries, by default entries are not published.

Users with superadmin flag will be notified by email when an entry is added to the feed and will be able to publish the entry.

Appart from superadmin, only users with the permission qgisfeed | Can publish QGIS feed can publish the entry. Like the group qgisfeedentry_authors, the group qgisfeedentry_approver with the permission qgisfeed | Can publish QGIS feed are created when a Save signal from the User model is detected.

For content field, a hard limit on the number of characters allowed is configurable in administration page (Character limit configurations). If not set, max characters value for this field is 500. If you want to add a custom max characters for this field, the field name value should be content.

Note: The permissions for this page are the same as described in the Control Panel and permissions.

After logging in with the login screen at /accounts/login/ (can be also accessed from the Login button on the Homepage), users are provided with tools to manage feed items:

• A list of feed items, sortable and filterable by title, date published, author, language, need review
• A button to create a new feed item - clicking will take you to a blank feed item form (See Feed item form below)
• Clicking on an item on the list will take you to a feed item form (See Feed item form below)

The feed item form page is displayed when clicking the New entry item button or an item on the list:

• The feed item form is displayed on the left with all the widgets needed to edit the entry. On the right, a preview of the entry as it will be rendered in QGIS. Any edits made in the form shall immediately update the preview.
• In the content widget only the following html tags are allowed: p, strong, italics. A hard limit on the number of characters allowed is configurable in administration page in the model Character limit configurations (default is 500).
• Once a feed item is created or modified, there will be a review step where the user is asked to confirm that they have checked everything carefully.
• The form is placed in the column Need review in the list before final submission.
• The form must be approved by someone the permission qgisfeed | Can publish QGIS feed before it is published.

The application has a single endpoint available at the web server root / the reponse is in JSON format.

Example call: http://localhost:8000/

Returned data:

[
  {
    "pk": 1,
    "title": "QGIS acquired by ESRI",
    "image": "http://localhost:8000/media/feedimages/image.png",
    "content": "<p>QGIS is finally part of the ESRI ecosystem, it has been rebranded as CrashGIS to better integrate with ESRI products line.</p>",
    "url": "https://www.qgis.com",
    "sticky": true,
    "publish_from": 1557419128
  },
  {
    "pk": 2,
    "title": "Null Island QGIS Meeting",
    "image": "",
    "content": "<p>Let's dive in the ocean together!</p>",
    "url": null,
    "sticky": false,
    "publish_from": 1557419128
  },
  {
    "pk": 3,
    "title": "QGIS Italian Meeting",
    "image": "",
    "content": "<p>Ciao from Italy!</p>",
    "url": null,
    "sticky": false,
    "publish_from": 1557419128
  }
]

The following parameters can be passed by the client to filter available records.

Parameters are validated and in case they are not valid a Bad Request HTTP error code 400 is returned.

When after is passed, only the records that have been published after the given value will be returned.

Accepted values: unix timestamp (UTC)

Example call: http://localhost:8000/?after=1557419013

When lang is passed, the records that have a different lang will be excluded from the results. Only the records with null lang and the records with a matching lang will be returned.

Accepted values: ISO-939-1 two letters language code

Example call: http://localhost:8000/?lang=de

When lat and lon are passed, the records that have a location filter set will be returned only if the point defined by lat and lon is within record's location.

Accepted values: ESPG:4326 latitude and longitude

Example call: http://localhost:8000/?lat=44.5&lon=9.23