Community news: enhancements and plans for 2024 - Oslandia's grant

[Guts]

Hello Resource Sharing users!

As part of its internal open source grant program, the Oslandia team (my employer) has voted in favor of allocating 8 days of development to the Resource Sharing project in 2024.
The purpose of this time budget is to maintain this widely used plugin. We hope to achieve the following three objectives:

• Upgrade and fix tooling (CI/CD), dependencies, and pin the minimum QGIS version to 3.34 LTR; - already started
• Remove code related to QtWebkit and JS/CC/HTML in favor of standard Qt interface elements;
• Integrate general settings into the QGIS preferences interface
• Resolve some persistent issues.

To facilitate tracking, all issues and pull requests related to this grant will be linked to this milestone: https://github.com/QGIS-Contribution/QGIS-ResourceSharing/milestones.

There are also other ideas gathered from issues or discussions with end-users during conferences or projects with my clients:

• Add support for Python expressions (Add Python expressions support #203 and Python expressions support  #267);
• Add support for check-lists (Missing checklists #191);
• Manage repositories whose branch is not master (error when adding repository that has no "master" branch #286);
• Generate repository and collection structures directly from QGIS by selecting resources to share and a target folder where to export;
• Manage the download of resources from the "hub": an example for styles https://plugins.qgis.org/styles/.

What are your priorities? Do you have other ideas?

Remember that if you regularly use this plugin and want to see it evolve, there are several ways:

• Code contributions are welcome (see the contributing guidelines);
• Improving documentation;
• Financing developers (Oslandia or others).

[Guts]

As mentioned in #182 (comment), I've just released a new beta version of the plugin. There is no big change inside but it's like a version with updated dependencies and some bug fixes to be considered as a starting point of this opening development cycle.

Please, try it harder and harder then create issues!