qgis2web was downloaded 500'000 recently. As this is quite a milestone for a plugin which was started approx. 5 years ago by creating qgis2leaf and qgis-ol3 form different developers, it is time to look ahead.
The use of maps as a form of knowledge transfer, illustration as well as a simple form of presenting an information has become incresingly popular in the past 10 years. Especially with the arrival of google maps and google earth, the questions "where?", "how far?" where even easier answered as befor. Furthermore, the technologies used by GIS and mapping experts became somehow "ubiquitious" as you can geocode, change projections, create buffers and many other things in a variety of software solutions now without even knowing what you're doing in detail.
My initial thought about qgis2leaf (one predecessor of qgis2web) was to bring several parts of a full blown GIS to the web user. So it startedt with exporting the map as it is and easily creating a web map for a non GIS user. The main driver: I've worked with colleagues in the past (2005-2010sh) and it was always a hazzle to show them data, exchange data with them ("What is the projection like?", My GIS XXX cannot read this!", "Google Earth can only read kml!", ...)
To be quite honest: I know about geoserver right away of course, but setting up a full server is also a hazzle for a non-web/IT user as the normal GIS expert is certainly not. So I've chosen to switch as many features as I could to Javascript. And I got to know the Esri Web AppBuilder which I love! It makes it easy for non-tech users to create a web mapping application with different functionalities as the creator wishes to offer.
With this in mind (and the help of a sponsor) I decided to enhance qgis2web with a filter option. This will allow the web map user to interactively change the current web map by applying filters to the layers.
I would love to enhace QGIS2web to a full blown web mapping application creation plugin which offers different tools to enhance the created web app by adding not only measure-tools, address search, filtering (like there are now) but also by adding routing, isochrone analysis, geo-operations (clip, union, join), add export functions for the map-content (save layer to excel, print web map to pdf) and other enhancements which are offered for leaflet already.
I don't really care if a user/creator is using openlayers, leaflet or other js-libraries out there (mapbox, esri js, googlemaps, D3, etc.). I simply want the possibility to create a web mapping application for a non GIS/IT user with as much functionality as possible. Leaflet itself offers a great variety of plugins, is easy to enhance/code for us as the creators and fits quite well in an open source driven approach.