Dear Federation, the Friendica team is pleased to announce the release of Friendica The Tazmans Flax-lily 2018.05.

Back on track with scheduled releases, after 3.6 took such a long time. In this release we have packed some bug fixes and enhancements. After an incompatibility glitch with the last release, Friendica 2018.05 is now again compatible with PHP 5.6. However we recommend using a more recent PHP version to further enhance the performance gain from the ongoing overhaul of the Friendica code and processes. Obviously GDPR was one thing we concentrated on for this release. Identifying problems in existing features (e.g. account and node mobility), adding new features (see below) and making things more transparent. To make a long story short, here a list of the noteworthy changes since the last release:

• Finnish translation was added to the repository from Transifex. With it, Friendica now has 20 localizations from which 11 have more then 80% of the core plattform translated (DE, EN, EN-GB, EN-US, ES, FI, FR, IT, PL, RU, ZH-CN).
• New module for Terms of Services for your node that can be activated from the admin panel. If the module is activated links from the general information page and the user registration will be added. Additionally a basic privacy statement can be shown in both, the TOS page and the registration page.
• Many utility scripts are now bundled in a console that can be found in the bin directory. Please see bin/console –help for all available commands.
• When entering a new password, the choosen one will be checked locally against a database of exposed passwords.
• As libravatar is closing their service we have added a new alternative to the gravatar service based on David Revoy’s cat-avatar-generator: the catavatar.
• The long deprecated themes frost( and frost-mobile have been removed from the Friendica repository. If you need them, you can find them in the deprecated-themes repository.

For a list of further changes, please have a look at the CHANGELOG file.


wordcloud from the commit messages

Thanks to everyone who made this release possible, by writing code, translating the user interface and reporting issues!

How to update?

Pre-Update procedures

Ensure that the last backup of your Friendica database was done recently. While testing, we did not encounter problems, but better save than sorry.

From 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-2018.05.tar.gz and friendica-addons-2018.05.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 .htconfig.php file. 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-2018.05 archive), so you don’t have to worry about them.

From git

Regardless of the branch you are on (master, develop or 2018.05-rc) all you have to do to get the new code is to run
git pull
on your server in the base and the addon directory. Remember to update the dependencies via composer as well.

If you helped testing the release candidate, you should also switch to either the master or the develop branch. Thanks for testing!

If you are updating from an older version then the 3.6 release, please be aware that Friendica is now using composer to manage the dependencies. After you pulled the latest code, you have to check the dependencies for updates as well. To do so run
bin/composer.phar install
from the base directory of your Friendica installation. To be able to extract the downloaded archives, you need to have the php-zip module installed on your server. If you don’t want to remember this every time you pull, you can also use a so called git-hook to do it automatically. Please have a look at the docs for further information about this.

If you are updating from a version older then 3.5.4 you have to make the update process in two steps due to a change in the updating procedure. First update to the 3.5.4 release and then update to the current release.

Post-Update procedures

If you are updating from the 3.6 release (or older versions) of Friendica please remember to change the path to the worker in the cron job to adopt the changed location.

It should now be something along these lines:
/usr/bin/php bin/worker.php
Among other things the worker will detect changes to the database structure. The changes will be applied automatically and may, depending on the size of your table (especially the item table) and the available resources on the server, take some time. On larger systems this can be hours.

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 everyone who helped making this release possible and have fun!

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