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

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.