We are wrapping up the work on Friendica over the last three month since the 2019.09 release, just in time for delivery over the Holidays at the end of the year. But that requires to test them and therefore we branched off the 2019.12-rc branch today and invite you to try it if you like to help us to test it.

To give you a short glimpse into the new features, here are three of them:

• Federation via the Diaspora* and ActivityPub protocol was improved, which includes making re-shares as native as possible.
• The ACL dialog has got an overhaul, hopefully making it more easy to use.
• You can now pin posts on your accounts wall.

Important

Please remember that Friendica now needs at least PHP version 7.0 and MySQL 5.6 (or equivalent) installed on the server to function properly.

How to help testing the release candidate?

Assuming that you are running the 2019.09 version of Friendica and that you have installed via git: 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 2019.12-rc during the pull. in both repositories. You just need to checkout this branch with a

git checkout 2019.12-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.