This release is mainly a bug fix release for the Asparagus release of Friendica. It closes some 50 issues from the Github tracker and various others the community has found. It also includes some work on the performance of the system, thanks to the bad performance of one of the developers hosting provider. Among other things, these changes also include some work on the database structure. These changes will be applied automatically, but may take some time depending on your system resources and database size.

Many thanks to everybody who reported a bug, fixed an issue or implemented a new feature!

You can find the complete list of changes in the CHANGELOG.

Notable changes

• The new worker background progress can now also be called from external cron jobs. If you are using one of the extcron, procrunner or poormancron addons you can now replace this now with the worker process. (Disable the addon when switching to the worker process.)
• The TinyMCE rich text editor was removed If you start typing a BBCode tag, a list of fitting BBCode elements will popup you can choose from.
• Initial native federation with Mastodon nodes is working. More work for the federation with OStatus using projects is planned for the upcoming 3.5.2 release.
• We deprecated the frost themes, as the default theme (vier) supports mobile devices with small screens since version 3.5. We have also deleted the files of the deprecated themes with the 3.5 release last year.

How to update?

If you are using git to keep track of the Friendica code, you can use

git pull

and it will fetch the current code. Don’t forget to also fetch the new code from the addon repository.

If you have installed Friendica and the addons from the zip file, you can download the corresponding files friendica-3.5.1.zip and friendica-addons.zip. Just download these files to your computer, unzip them and transfer the files with an FTP client to your server into a new directory. Copy the .htconfig.php file into the new directory. Rename the old directory and afterwards change the name of the new directory to the initial name of your Friendica directory.

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.

Have fun 🙂