Friendica 2019.01 released

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!


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