For the past few months, the GeoServer team has been working behind the scenes on rebranding GeoServer.  Historically, GeoServer hasn’t had a very strong visual identity, but there has been significant interest as of late, especially as talk of the new GeoServer UI has entered alpha status.  So, ace stylers Andy Cochran and Chris Patterson worked their design magic and came up with a new icon, logo, and color scheme.  So now we officially unveil the new look of geoserver.org (and this blog)!  This was an iterative process, and the materials benefited from community involvement (specifically the icon, which now happily manages to squeeze in all continents).  Elements of this design will eventually be incorporated into GeoServer itself.  We also have a website which contains icons and logos available for download.  We hope you like the new look as much as we do.

If you’re reading this blog through an RSS feed, why don’t you check out the site itself?

I just ran across this interesting post from a few weeks ago.  It seems that an alphabet soup of non-profit companies, The Getty Conservation Institute (GCI), World Monuments Fund (WMF), and Jordan Department of Antiquities (DoA) are developing a geographic information system to manage archaeological sites in Jordan.

The Middle Eastern Geodatabase for Antiquities (MEGA) - Jordan will be a Web-based, bilingual (Arabic-English) system that will be used by inspectors, archaeologists, scholars, and government planners involved in cultural heritage management and research.To this end, the planners have embraced open source:

“…Software needs to be open source or low cost, because in Jordan a traditional GIS desktop license costs many times more than the annual salary of a highly trained technical employee.”And not just any open source GIS, too:

The open source software technologies will include PostGIS and GeoServer along with a public mapping front-end such as Google Maps.Not only that, it looks like that MEGA-Jordan is a prototype system set to be eventually deployed to other areas, such as Iraq.  In a part of the world with a rich cultural history and a surfeit of archeological sites, this is information well worth cataloging.

This is a great use of GeoServer in the wild, and I will be following its development closely.  Launch date is tentatively set for fall of 2009.

Read the full press release here.

GeoServer has been mentioned on the website linux.com.  In their Tips And Tricks area, they have written a quick tutorial on installing and running GeoServer in Linux (Ubuntu, specifically), downloading a TIGER shapefile, loading the shapefile in GeoServer, and even a brief introduction to styling.  This page covers a lot of ground in a short space, but I think that’s its beauty in it.  Some might be a little intimidated by the SLD styling code (someday a graphical styler with make raw XML coding unecessary) but it’s currently just a part of the process.  All in all, it’s a great tutorial, and might be a good read even if you’re already familiar with GeoServer.  There’s always more to learn, after all.

We seem to be releasing something every week now, a testament to our tireless developers and input of the community.  Last week, we released 1.6.5, which is still the official stable release at the time of writing.  However, we are closer than ever to a stable release of the 1.7.0 branch, and today we release the third release candidate of 1.7.0 to the wider world.  Among others, there were two pernicious bugs that caused FeatureTypes and coverages to disappear in certain circumstances.  (Yikes!)  No more, though.  In total, there are 19 bug fixes in since RC2, and as usual, we encourage you to test out the latest version.  Will the fourth release candidate be the charm?  Stay tuned.

The GeoServer team would like to present the newest stable version of GeoServer, 1.6.5. This is likely to be the last release of the 1.6.x branch, as development moves towards a stable version of 1.7.x. Nevertheless, this is an important release, as it features a whopping 65 bug fixes and improvements. Special thanks go to Léon van Berlo for translating GeoServer into Dutch. This marks our eighth language, and means we now have between approximately 100 and 6904 left to go, depending on what source we quote and how we define a language. We also have WMS point layers rendering correctly again, fixes regarding using the Google Maps projection, and improvements to the Map Preview area of the admin console. You can take a look at the entire changelog if you’d like, or just download this version and check it out for yourself.  Feedback welcome!