Following our tradition of annual Hackathons we will gather together at the first weekend in October (Friday 1st to Sunday 3rd). As it was the case last year, the 2021 Hackathon will be online again. Further information on how to join will be posted in this conversation in the developers Forum.
If you want to join the Hackathon, please do so! No programming skills required for discussions and feedback is welcome.
We are pleased to announce that we branched off the 2021.09 release candidate from the current development branch in preparation to the upcoming release. Over the summer scheduled postings were implemented and the admin panels look into the log file got some refurbishment. For a more detailed list of changes, please see pull request 10621.
If you want to help to hunt down rough edges and bugs ahead of the release in June, now is the perfect moment to switch from the stable or development branch to the freshly created 2021.09-rc branch. To do so please run
git fetch
git checkout 2021.09-rc
git pull
bin/composer.phar install --no-devin the root directory of your Friendica and the addon directory. The command to update the dependencies (composer) is only necessary in the Friendica root directory.
Thanks for testing the new release! If you find any problems, please report them either at the issue tracker on github or in the support forum.
Please note that the minimal PHP version that Friendica is requiring with this release will be PHP 7.2.
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 above.
We are very happy to announce the availability of the new stable release of Friendica “Siberian Iris” 2021.07. This release contains 219 pull requests from ten contributors and the work of the translation teams. While fixing some problems identified, we have added some nice features
For a detailed overview of the changes, please have a look at the CHANGELOG.
If you are updating from an older version than the 2020.03 release, please first update your Friendica instance to that version.
In that version we introduced views to the database and some node admins reported that they had to adjust their MariaDB configuration (table_definition_cache). Also setting pdo_emulate_prepares to true in the Friendica configuration might be nessessary.
Ensure that the last backup of your Friendica installation was done recently. We had no problems reported during the upgrade process from 2021.04 to the 2021.06 release candidate, so hopefully you will have a smooth transition.
Please make sure to use Barracuda as MySQL DB file format for your Friendica database. Change your database settings before you proceed with the Friendica update. This change will take some time depending on the size of your database.
Updating from the git repositories should only involve a pull from the Friendica core repository and addons repository, regardless of the branch (stable or develop) you are using. Remember to update the dependencies with composer as well.
cd friendica
git fetch
git checkout BRANCH
git pull
bin/composer.phar install --no-dev
cd addon
git fetch
git checkout BRANCH
git pullPulling in the dependencies with composer will show some deprecation warning, we will be working on that in the upcoming release.
If you had downloaded the source files in an archive file (tar.gz) please download the current version of the archive (friendica-full-2021.07.tar.gz and friendica-addons 2021.07.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 (config/local.config.php and config/addon.config.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-2021.07 archive), so you don’t have to worry about them.
The database update should be applied automatically, but sometimes it gets stuck. If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script
bin/console dbstructure updatefrom the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned below.
Please note, that some of the changes to the database structure will take some time to be applied, depending on the size of your Friendica database.
Please note, that one of the dependencies of Friendica is currently incompatible with PHP 7.0. If you are still running that version of PHP, please have a look at this forum thread for a workaround.
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!
Back to the schedule, we are glad to announce the availability of the initial release candidate of the Friendica 2021.06 release. During the past month. the focus of the work was on enhancing the Mastodon compatible API and adding support for RTL languages to the web interface as well as new addons to use SAML services like Keycloak for login.
If you want to help to hunt down rough edges and bugs ahead of the release in June, now is the perfect moment to switch from the stable or development branch to the freshly created 2021.06-rc branch. To do so please run
git fetch
git checkout 2021.06-rc
git pull
bin/composer.phar install --no-devin the root directory of your Friendica and the addon directory. The command to update the dependencies (composer) is only necessary in the Friendica root directory.
Thanks for testing the new release! If you find any problems, please report them either at the issue tracker on github or in the support forum.
Please be aware the since the last stable release the database structure was changed, after the switch to the RC branch your server will need some time to perform these changes.
Please note, that one of the dependencies of Friendica is currently incompatible with PHP 7.0. If you are still running that version of PHP, please have a look at this forum thread for a workaround.
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 above.
With a slight delay, we are happy to announce the availability of the new stable version of the Friendica communications server: Friendica Siberian Iris 2021.04.
This is mostly a bug fixing release, stabilizing the new features we introduced over the Red Hot Poker cycle, but also finishing some long time restructuring work on the database structure, which results in a greatly improved performance of Friendica. This release bundles 196 pull requests fixing 53 filed issues. For a detailed overview of the changes, please have a look at the CHANGELOG, some of the highlights
And a heads up for developers, we moved some endpoints in the API to normalize the endpoints.
If you are updating from an older version than the 2020.03 release, please first update your Friendica instance to that version.
In that version we introduced views to the database and some node admins reported that they had to adjust their MariaDB configuration (table_definition_cache). Also setting pdo_emulate_prepares to true in the Friendica configuration might be necessary.
Ensure that the last backup of your Friendica installation was done recently. Despite the long duration of the database upgrade we had no reports of unaddressed problems during the RC phase.
Please make sure to use Barracuda as MySQL DB file format for your Friendica database. Change your database settings before you proceed with the Friendica update. This change will take some time depending on the size of your database.
Important: We removed the master branch and are using the stable branch instead.
Updating from the git repositories should only involve a pull from the Friendica core repository and addons repository, regardless of the branch (stable or develop) you are using. Remember to update the dependencies with composer as well.
cd friendica
git fetch
git checkout stable
git pull
bin/composer.phar install --no-dev
cd addon
git fetch
git checkout stable
git pullPulling in the dependencies with composer will show some deprecation warning, we will be working on that in the upcoming release.
If you had downloaded the source files in an archive file (tar.gz) please download the current version of the archive (friendica-full-2021.04.tar.gz and friendica-addons 2021.04.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 (config/local.config.php and config/addon.config.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-2021.01 archive), so you don’t have to worry about them.
The database update should be applied automatically, but sometimes it gets stuck. If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script
bin/console dbstructure updatefrom the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned below.
Please note, that some of the changes to the database structure will take some time to be applied, depending on the size of your Friendica database.
Please note, that one of the dependencies of Friendica is currently incompatible with PHP 7.0. If you are still running that version of PHP, please have a look at this forum thread for a workaround.
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!
We are very happy to announce, that we’ve branched off the 2021.03 Release Candidate from the development branch. Doing so we are entering feature freeze for the upcoming stable release in March, only bug fixes and translation / documentation updates will flow into that branch. Some highlights for the upcoming 2021.03 release are:
item table. This replacement will take a long time (hours), depending on the size of your installations number of stored items, but it is worth the speed gain.If you are using git to manage the code on your Friendica instance and want to test the upcoming release, helping us to smooth out some rough edges and squash some bugs you can do to by checking out the 2021.03-rc branch of the repository.
cd /path/to/friendica
git fetch
git checkout 2021.03-rc
git pull
bin/composer.phar install --no-dev
cd addon
git fetch
git checkout 2021.03-rc
git pullThanks for testing the new release! If you find any problems, please report them either at the issue tracker on github or in the support forum.
Please be aware the since the last stable release the database structure was changed, after the switch to the RC branch your server will need some time (hours) to perform these changes.
Please note, that one of the dependencies of Friendica is currently incompatible with PHP 7.0. If you are still running that version of PHP, please have a look at this forum thread for a workaround.
Due hardening the OEmbed mechanism, embedding external resources may currently not be working as expected.
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 above.
and a happy new year dear reader. Not quiet in time for the holidays, but we are very happy to announce the availability of the latest stable version of the Friendica communications server which bundles up some 270 pull requests closing 86 numbered issues. For a detailed overview of the changes, please have a look at the CHANGELOG, some of the highlights
worker_cooldown in your configuration file.
If you are updating from an older version than the 2020.03 release, please first update your Friendica instance to that version.
In that version we introduced views to the database and some node admins reported that they had to adjust their MariaDB configuration (table_definition_cache). Also setting pdo_emulate_prepares to true in the Friendica configuration might be nessessary.
Ensure that the last backup of your Friendica installation was done recently. We had no problems reported during the upgrade process from 2020.09 to the 2020.12 release candidate, so hopefully you will have a smooth transition.
Please make sure to use Barracuda as MySQL DB file format for your Friendica database. Change your database settings before you proceed with the Friendica update. This change will take some time depending on the size of your database.
Important: We removed the master branch and are using the stable branch instead.
Updating from the git repositories should only involve a pull from the Friendica core repository and addons repository, regardless of the branch (stable or develop) you are using. Remember to update the dependencies with composer as well.
cd friendica
git fetch
git checkout stable
git pull
bin/composer.phar install --no-dev
cd addon
git fetch
git checkout stable
git pullPulling in the dependencies with composer will show some deprecation warning, we will be working on that in the upcoming release. If you want to use the current development version of Friendica instead of the stable released version, you can checkout develop instead, but be aware that the develop branch might be unstable and buggy.
If you had downloaded the source files in an archive file (tar.gz) please download the current version of the archive (friendica-full-2021.01.tar.gz and friendica-addons 2021.01.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 (config/local.config.php and config/addon.config.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-2021.01 archive), so you don’t have to worry about them.
The database update should be applied automatically, but sometimes it gets stuck. If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script
bin/console dbstructure updatefrom the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned below.
Please note, that some of the changes to the database structure will take some time to be applied, depending on the size of your Friendica database.
Please note, that one of the dependencies of Friendica is currently incompatible with PHP 7.0. If you are still running that version of PHP, please have a look at this forum thread for a workaround.
Some admins had problems during the upgrade of the database structure. See e.g. this issue on github about it.
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!
The year is slowly nearing its end and as part of the holiday season preparations we are wrapping up the Friendica 2020.12 release. As part of this, we are very happy to announce the availability of the Release Candid branch of Friendica 2020.12 and hope that some of you will join the process of hunting down rough edges and problems with the release, before the new stable version is published later this month.
If you want to help, now is the perfect moment to switch from the stable or development branch to the freshly created 2020.12-rc branch. To do so please run
git fetch
git checkout 2020.12-rc
git pull
bin/composer.phar install --no-devin the root directory of your Friendica and the addon directory. The command to update the dependencies (composer) is only necessary in the Friendica root directory.
Thanks for testing the new release! If you find any problems, please report them either at the issue tracker on github or in the support forum.
Please be aware the since the last stable release the database structure was changed, after the switch to the RC branch your server will need some time (hours) to perform these changes.
Please note, that one of the dependencies of Friendica is currently incompatible with PHP 7.0. If you are still running that version of PHP, please have a look at this forum thread for a workaround.
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 above.
Last weekend we had our annual Hackathon for the Friendica project. Unlike the years before, this time organized remotely using a conference room at the BigBlueButton instance of Senfcall instead of the cozy venture at E-LOK. Meeting in person is great, for all the socializing around the project, but we did manage to get some of it into the virtual space. Discussing lots of issues and ideas for Friendica and having a productive weekend.
Thanks to all, who made this weekend as wonderful as it was 🙂
Over the Hackathon we had 23 pull requests merged into the core repository of Friendica. Eleven pull requests for the directory and two for the addons repository got merged as well. Some of the highlights:
update_active_contacts option was added to the configuration of Friendica which might help to enhance the performance of nodes running on limited hardware like the RaspberryPi.During the RC phase of the 2020.09 release of Friendica a problem during sending out notification mails was not observed by the testers, but only reported after the release. Therefore we release now the 2020.09-1 hotfix release which will re-enable those mails.
If you are updating from an older version than the 2020.03 release, please first update your Friendica instance to that version.
Ensure that the last backup of your Friendica installation was done recently. We had no problems reported during the upgrade process from 2020.07 to the 2020.09 release candidate, so hopefully you will have a smooth transition.
Please make sure to use Barracuda as MySQL DB file format for your Friendica database. Change your database settings before you proceed with the Friendica update. This change will take some time depending on the size of your database.
Important: We are removing the master branch and are using the stable branch instead.
Updating from the git repositories should only involve a pull from the Friendica core repository and addons repository, regardless of the branch (stable or develop) you are using. Remember to update the dependencies with composer as well.
cd friendica
git fetch
git checkout BRANCH
bin/composer.phar install --no-dev
cd addon
git fetch
git checkout BRANCHPulling in the dependencies with composer will show some deprecation warning, we will be working on that in the upcoming release.
If you had downloaded the source files in an archive file (tar.gz) please download the current version of the archive (friendica-full-2020.09-1.tar.gz and friendica-addons 2020.09-1.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 (config/local.config.php and config/addon.config.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-2020.09 archive), so you don’t have to worry about them.
The database update should be applied automatically, but sometimes it gets stuck. If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script
bin/console dbstructure updatefrom the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned below.
Please note, that some of the changes to the database structure will take some time to be applied, depending on the size of your Friendica database.
If you are using lighttpd to serve your Friendica node the boolean AND operator for the full text search seems not to be working at the moment.
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!