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92 days
Latest Release
1313 days ago

Changelog History
Page 2

  • v2019.01 Changes

    January 21, 2019

    We are pleased to announce the availability of Friendica The Tazmans Flax-lily 2019.01, which bundles up our work since September 2018. This includes over 130 fixed issues and some exciting new features. If you are interested in all of them, please have a look at the CHANGELOG file.

    Most noteworthy of these changes are:

    • ✅ Friendica does now natively support ActivityPub (AP) in addition to the DFRN, diaspora* and OStatus protocols. The AP functionality was tested with Hubzilla, Mastodon, Nextcloud Social, Osada, PeerTube, Pixelfed and Pleroma.
    • 🔧 The configuration structure has changed again! Your old .htconfig.php and config/local.ini.php file will still work, but you will get a notification in the admin panel with some hopefully explaining text on how to convert your settings to the new config/local.config.php config file.
    • The manual and automatic installation process was enhanced.

    🚀 Thanks everyone who has made this release possible. Your work is much appreciated!

    👍 Please note, that this will be the last version of Friendica supporting PHP 5.6.

    ⚡️ How to Update

    🚀 If you are updating from an older version then the 2018.09 release, please first update your Friendica instance to that version as there were several important changes in that version.

    ⚡️ Please further note, that since Friendica 3.6 we use composer for dependency management. If you are updating via git, you have to remember to update the dependencies as well.

    ⚡️ Pre-Update Procedures

    ✅ Ensure that the last backup of your Friendica installation was done recently. While testing, we did not encounter problems, but better save than sorry.

    Please note that Friendica now requires MySQL version 5.6+ or compatible (e.g. MariaDB 10.0.5). Please make sure, that your systems meets this new requirement.

    Using the Archive files

    🚀 If you had downloaded the source files in an archive file (zip or tar.gz) please download the current version of the archive from GitHub (friendica-full-2019.01.tar.bz2 [or tar.gz] and friendica-addons-2019.01.tar.gz and unpack it on your local computer.

    🆕 As many files got deleted or moved around, please upload the unpacked files to a new directory on your server (say friendica_new) and copy over your existing configuration and .htaccess files. Afterwards rename your current Friendica directory (e.g. friendica) to friendica_old and friendica_new to friendica.

    The files of the dependencies are included in the archive (make sure you are using the friendica-full-2019.01 archive), so you don’t have to worry about them.

    🔧 Please be aware of the changes in the configuration format. You should follow the instructions linked from your admin panel as soon as possible to move your configuration to the new location.

    Using git

    ⚡️ Updating from the git repositories should only involve a pull from the Friendica core repository and addons repository. Remember to also update the dependencies with composer.

    cd friendica
git pull
bin/composer.phar install
cd addon
git pull

    ✅ If you want to switch the branch (e.g. if you helped testing the RC code) please do so after the pull using git checkout.

    Known Problems

    _ Update 2019-01-22 _: Some of the early adopters have discovered the following issues, that went unnoticed during the RC phase.

    ⚡️ Sometimes the update process of the database seems to get stuck. If you notice high LOAD on your system and MySQL active processes in the process list that seem to cause the LOAD, please issue the following command from the base of your Friendica installation on the CLI.

      bin/console.php dbstructure update

    ⚡️ The config update guide seems not to be shown in the admin panel. As mentioned above, both old config formats are still supported, so no need to hurry. But if you are looking for the guide to migrate your config file format to the new one, please see here: help/Config.

    How to Contribute?

    👷 If you want to contribute to the project, you don’t need to have coding experience. There are a number of tasks listed in the issue tracker with the label “Junior Jobs” we think are good for new contributors. But you are by no means limited to these – if you find a solution to a problem (even a new one) please make a pull request at github or let us know in the development forum.

    📚 Contribution to Friendica is also not limited to coding. Any contribution to the documentation, the translation or advertisement materials is welcome or reporting a problem. You don’t need to deal with git(hub) or Transifex if you don’t like to. Just get in touch with us and we will get the materials to the appropriate places.

    🚀 Thanks again everyone who helped making this release possible and have fun!

  • v2018.09 Changes

    October 04, 2018

    Dear everybody in the Federation, the Fediverse and anywhere else, the Friendica team is pleased to announce the release of Friendica The Tazmans Flax-lily 2018.09.

    This release brings the long awaited restructuring of the item table in the database, alongside some 100 closed issues from the tracker. Please see the CHANGELOG file for the complete overview of the changes. Here just a short list of the noteworthy changes since the 2018.05 release of Friendica.

    • 🚀 The long awaited restructuring of the item table of the database will finally be included in this release. The needed changes and alterations of the database structure and content will take some time. Depending on the resources available on your system this can take hours or even days. The maintenance mode will inform you about the progress.
    • 💅 The configuration structure is changed. Your old .htconfig.php file will still work, but you will get a notification in the admin panel with some hopefully explaining text on how to convert your settings to the config file. In some cases the encoding of the displayed text got mangled up, if you are suffering from such garbage you need to switch to the new config style and set the correct encoding for the database.
    • The .htaccess file is no part of the git repository anymore. Instead we now ship the .htaccess-dist file that you have to copy to the .htaccess location. This has the advantage that you can now customise the .htaccess file to meet your requirements. Please make a copy of your old .htaccess file should you have made any changes and restore the file after the update from the backup or the distributed file. Without a working .htaccess file your node will probably not work!
    • 🚀 We removed the old syntax highlighting mechanism from [code] blocks due to problems federating the highlighted syntax to other platforms. There will be an addon for this in the next release.
    • 🚀 The libravatar service will be continued, so contrary to the note with the last release, you can keep using the libravatar addon to automatically generate avatar pictures for your users.

    🚀 Thanks everyone who has made this release possible. Your work is much appreciated!

    ⚡️ How to Update

    ⚡️ Updating from old Friendica versions

    🚀 If you are updating from a version older then Friendica 3.5.4) you have to make the update process in two steps due to a change in the updating procedure. First update to the 3.5.4 release and then update to the current release.

    🚀 Please further note, that since Friendica 3.6 we use composer for dependency management. If you are updating via git, you have to remember to update the dependencies as well.

    ⚡️ Pre-Update Procedures

    ✅ Ensure that the last backup of your Friendica installation was done recently. While testing, we did not encounter problems (except those listed below), but better save than sorry.

    ⚡️ This is especially true during this update for your .htaccess file which we removed from the repository so you can make local adjustments to the files without further conflicts. Please make a copy of the file before you start the update and restore it afterwards. If you have not made any changes to the file, you can use the new .htaccess-dist file and copy that to the .htaccess file.

    Using the Archive files

    💻 If you had downloaded the source files in an archive file (zip or tar.gz) please download the current version of the archive from GitHub (friendica-full-2018.09.tar.gz and friendica-addons-2018.09.tar.gz) and unpack it on your local computer.

    🆕 As many files got deleted or moved around, please upload the unpacked files to a new directory on your server (say friendica_new) and copy over your existing .htconfig.php and .htaccess files. Afterwards rename your current Friendica directory (e.g. friendica) to friendica_old and friendica_new to friendica.

    The files of the dependencies are included in the archive (make sure you are using the friendica-full-2018.09 archive), so you don’t have to worry about them.

    🔧 Please be aware of the changes in the configuration format. You should follow the instructions linked from your admin panel as soon as possible to move your configuration to the new location.

    Using git

    ⚡️ Updating from the git repositories should only involve a pull from the Friendica core repository and addons repository. Remember to also update the dependencies with composer.

    cd friendica
git pull
bin/composer.phar install
cd addons
git pull

    If you want to switch the branch (e.g. if you helped testing the RC code) please do so after the pull using git checkout.

    ⏪ Be aware that the .htaccess file was removed from the git repository. You have to restore yours from a backup (if you have done local changes) or from the .htaccess-dist file (copy the file to .htaccess if you had not done any changes to the old .htaccess file).

    ⚡️ Post-Update Procedures

    The conversion process of the items stored in the database can take a long time. Reports indicate some hours to days or even weeks depending on the number of stored items and the available resources on the server.

    💻 If you can start the process directly from the command line interface, this will speed up the process significantly. To do so run the following command (use screen or a similar tool so you can detach from the session while the process is running):

    bin/console postupdate

    from the base of your Friendica installation.

    The conversation of the stored items to the new structure of the database will cause some load on the server. It will not interfere with the daily usage of your Friendica node. Once it is finished the needed storage for the database should be lowered significantly, especially on large nodes.

    Known Problems

    ⚡️ Should the DB update process get stuck

    ⚡️ If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script

    bin/console dbstructure update

    from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned below.

    Problem with InnoDB on MySQL 5.7

    One user reported problems during the update of the database using MySQL 5.7 getting the error message Creating index 'PRIMARY' required more than 'innodb_online_alter_log_max_size' bytes of modification log. Please try again. from MySQL. If you encounter this problem, please try the following:

    • increase the config value mentioned in the error message above,
    • ⚡️ execute this command in your mysql console: update config set v=1278 where k="post_update_version";
    • ⚡️ after this execute the command bin/console postupdate.

    How to Contribute?

    👷 If you want to contribute to the project, you don’t need to have coding experience. There are a number of tasks listed in the issue tracker with the label “Junior Jobs” we think are good for new contributors. But you are by no means limited to these – if you find a solution to a problem (even a new one) please make a pull request at github or let us know in the development forum.

    📚 Contribution to Friendica is also not limited to coding. Any contribution to the documentation, the translation or advertisement materials is welcome or reporting a problem. You don’t need to deal with git(hub) or Transifex if you don’t like to. Just get in touch with us and we will get the materials to the appropriate places.

    🚀 Thanks everyone who helped making this release possible and have fun!

  • v2018.05 Changes

    June 01, 2018

    👯 If you don't want to clone the repository but use an archive file to download Friendica, please use the friendica-full-2018.05.tar.gz file and not the automatically generated archives. The full archive does also include the dependencies. If you downloaded one of the other archives, either download the full archive or run bin/composer.phar install --no-dev at the CLI from the base of your Friendica directory.

    Dear Federation, the Friendica team is pleased to announce the release of Friendica The Tazmans Flax-lily 2018.05.

    🚀 Back on track with scheduled releases, after 3.6 took such a long time. In this release we have packed some bug fixes and enhancements. After an incompatibility glitch with the last release, Friendica 2018.05 is now again compatible with PHP 5.6. However we recommend using a more recent PHP version to further enhance the performance gain from the ongoing overhaul of the Friendica code and processes. Obviously GDPR was one thing we concentrated on for this release. Identifying problems in existing features (e.g. account and node mobility), adding new features (see below) and making things more transparent. To make a long story short, here a list of the noteworthy changes since the last release:

    • 🌐 Finnish translation was added to the repository from Transifex. With it, Friendica now has 20 localizations from which 11 have more then 80% of the core plattform translated (DE, EN, EN-GB, EN-US, ES, FI, FR, IT, PL, RU, ZH-CN).
    • 🆕 New module for Terms of Services for your node that can be activated from the admin panel. If the module is activated links from the general information page and the user registration will be added. Additionally a basic privacy statement can be shown in both, the TOS page and the registration page.
    • 👀 Many utility scripts are now bundled in a console that can be found in the bin directory. Please see bin/console --help for all available commands.
    • When entering a new password, the choosen one will be checked locally against a database of exposed passwords.
    • As libravatar is closing their service we have added a new alternative to the gravatar service based on David Revoy's cat-avatar-generator: the catavatar.
    • 🚚 The long deprecated themes frost( and frost-mobile have been removed from the Friendica repository. If you need them, you can find them in the deprecated-themes repository.

    For a list of further changes, please have a look at the CHANGELOG file.

    🚀 Thanks to everyone who made this release possible, by writing code, translating the user interface and reporting issues!

    ⚡️ How to update?

    ⚡️ Pre-Update procedures

    ✅ Ensure that the last backup of your Friendica database was done recently. While testing, we did not encounter problems, but better save than sorry.

    From the archive files

    💻 If you had downloaded the source files in an archive file (zip or tar.gz) please download the current version of the archive from GitHub (friendica-full-2018.05.tar.gz and friendica-addons-2018.05.tar.gz) and unpack it on your local computer.

    🆕 As many files got deleted or moved around, please upload the unpacked files to a new directory on your server (say friendica_new) and copy over your existing .htconfig.php file. Afterwards rename your current Friendica directory (e.g. friendica) to friendica_old and friendica_new to friendica.

    The files of the dependencies are included in the archive (make sure you are using the friendica-full-2018.05 archive), so you don't have to worry about them.

    From git

    Regardless of the branch you are on (master, develop or 2018.05-rc) all you have to do to get the new code is to run

    git pull

    ⚡️ on your server in the base and the addon directory. Remember to update the dependencies via composer as well.

    🚀 If you helped testing the release candidate, you should also switch to either the master or the develop branch. Thanks for testing!

    🚀 If you are updating from an older version then the 3.6 release , please be aware that Friendica is now using composer to manage the dependencies. After you pulled the latest code, you have to check the dependencies for updates as well. To do so run

    bin/composer.phar install

    📄 from the base directory of your Friendica installation. To be able to extract the downloaded archives, you need to have the php-zip module installed on your server. If you don't want to remember this every time you pull, you can also use a so called git-hook to do it automatically. Please have a look at the docs for further information about this.

    ⚡️ If you are updating from a version older then 3.5.4 you have to make the update process in two steps due to a change in the updating procedure. First update to the 3.5.4 release and then update to the current release.

    ⚡️ Post-Update procedures

    🚀 If you are updating from the 3.6 release (or older versions) of Friendica please remember to change the path to the worker in the cron job to adopt the changed location.

    It should now be something along these lines:

    /usr/bin/php bin/worker.php

    👷 Among other things the worker will detect changes to the database structure. The changes will be applied automatically and may, depending on the size of your table (especially the item table) and the available resources on the server, take some time. On larger systems this can be hours.

    How to Contribute?

    👷 If you want to contribute to the project, you don’t need to have coding experience. There are a number of tasks listed in the issue tracker with the label “Junior Jobs” we think are good for new contributors. But you are by no means limited to these – if you find a solution to a problem (even a new one) please make a pull request at github or let us know in the development forum.

    📚 Contribution to Friendica is also not limited to coding. Any contribution to the documentation, the translation or advertisement materials is welcome or reporting a problem. You don’t need to deal with git(hub) or Transifex if you don’t like to. Just get in touch with us and we will get the materials to the appropriate places.

    🚀 Thanks everyone who helped making this release possible and have fun!