Dear Federation, we are pleased to announce the immedeate availability of Friendica “Asparagus” 3.5.2.

The main focus of the last few months’ work was spent on internal code restructuring and performance enhancements. For a full list of changes, please refer to the CHANGELOG file. The highlights are:

• Enhanced compatibility with MySQL 5.7+.
• New support for 4 bytes unicode characters (mostly used for emojis). MySQL version 5.5.3 is now a hard minimum requirement.
• Enhanced federation with Mastodon and preparation for upcoming changes in the Diaspora protocol.
• The switch to the worker process introduced in the 3.5.1 version as the background process mechanism as it has a better performance. If you are using poorman’s cron, external cron or proc runner for the background process, you have to adopt to the frontend worker* (see docs) as it makes these addons obsolete.
• The most visible change is the long time project lead by Rabuzarus, the “frio” theme, which finally removed the “experimental” flag. It still is not 100 percent complete, but it is ready for daily usage.

Addtionally we fixed numerous bugs that the community had found and we polished some quirks.

How to Update?

Make sure to have MySQL 5.5.3+ or a compatible version (e.g. MariaDB) installed on your server.

If you used `git` to install your copy of Friendica and use the `master` or `develop` branch, a `git pull` is enough to upgrade.

If you have helped to iron out quirks for this release and used the `3.5.2rc` branch of the repository, please switch to either the `master` or `develop` branch after the `git pull`.

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-3.5.2.zip and friendica-addons-3.5.2.zip) 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`.

Please note theat there are some changes to the database structure that will take some time to be applied.

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 🙂