Today we have branched off the release candidate (RC) for the upcoming 2019.01 release of Friendica The Tazmans Flax-lily. Over the last 4 month many issues were resolved, alongside with some enhancements and new features. For all these changes we now feel it is time for them to get released. Before this will happen, we’d like to invite you, to test them and report back some rough edges and problems you encountered. We are especially interested in the experiences of people who are currently running the 2018.09 release of Friendica.

Some things you should be aware of before testing:

• To prevent most Cross-Site Scripting attacks, templates are now escaped by default site-wide. The scale of the change has led to uncaught visual artifacts where actual HTML code would be visible instead of their representation. Please report any such lingering instances on GitHub.
• 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.

How to help testing the release candidate?

Please pull the current sources for the core of Friendica and the addons from GitHub. You should see a notification about a new branch called 2019.01-rc during the pull. in both repositories You just need to checkout this branch with a

$> git checkout 2019.01-rc

and remember to follow the usual steps after updating using git. Please report any issues you encounter using either the issue tracker at github or the Friendica support or admin forums.

If you used to be on the 2018.12-rc branch

You can switch to the newly named branch by fetching the remotes and checking out the 2019.01-rc branch.

$> git fetch --all
$> git checkout 2019.01-rc

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 above.

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 query in your MySQL console: UPDATE `config` SET `v` = 1278 WHERE `k` = "post_update_version";
• after this execute the command $> bin/console postupdate.