Today we have branched off the release candidate (RC) for the upcoming 2019.03 release of Friendica. Since end of January, we fixed some bugs and added some interesting new features. These include:

• The used storage backend for uploaded media files is now plug-able. By default Friendica currently support the file system and the database as storage devices. But this list can be expanded via addons.
• The postings and comments of the logged in user now have a delivery indication included in the displayed header of the posting.
• The frio theme has got a live preview of new attachments, and
• visitors can now override the language settings by appending a lang=CODE parameter to the URL in the browser address bar.

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. Afterwards you can continue to update to the RC branch.

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 2019.03-RC during the pull. in both repositories. You just need to checkout this branch with a

git checkout 2019.03-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.

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.