We are happy to announce the availability of the release candidate for the upcoming Friendica 2022.12 release, to focus on fixing existing bugs and smoothing out of rough edges..

Since October we have fixed around 40 filed tickets from the issue tracker, around 100 pull requests have been labeled as enhancements and 11 added new features. Among these the highlights are

• Enhancements to the Mastodon compatible API,
• The calendar can now be made accessible to anonymous visitors of the profile,
• The homepage listed in the profile can now be verified, and
• The moderation tools for the nodes admin was separated from the rest of the admin panel.

Please note:

• If you are using the Apache2 web server, you have to update your .htaccess file with the changes to the .htaccess-dist file. Basically you have to add a B at the line 54.
• The functions from the boot.php file have been moved into better fitting classes this may break your custom addons. See the pull requests #1293 and #1294 in the addon repository about the needed changes to your addons.

What is Friendica

Friendica is a decentralised communications platform, you can use to host your own social media server that integrates with independent social networking platforms (like the Fediverse or Diaspora*) but also some commercial ones like Twitter.

How to use the 2022.12 RC Version of Friendica

If you want to help in the release process, you can checkout the 2022.12-rc branch from the git repositories (core and addons).

git fetch
git checkout 2022.12-rc
git pull
bin/composer.phar install --no-dev

Note that you only need to pull the composer dependencies in the core repository.

Should the upgrade process of the database 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.

What to do with Quirks

The 2022.12-rc phase is meant to identify and preferable resolve quirks and bugs that should not be in the 2022.12 release, but have slipped through so far. So if you switch your node to the 2022.12-rc version of Friendica, please let us know about rough edges you find, either at the issue tracker (github account required), in the support forum or in the development forum.

Thanks a lot for helping with the release 🙂