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:

• The ongoing work to enhance the database structure has reached the point of replacement the old 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.
• CVE-2021-27329 was filed as ticket 9929 External service interaction (HTTP & DNS) and has been fixed with PR 9935.
• The frontend worker mechanism was removed entirely.

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 pull

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.

Known Problems

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.

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.