GroupServer YY.MM — Sherry sipped silently

Unreleased

Authors:Michael JasonSmith;
Contact:Michael JasonSmith <mpj17@ldots.org>
Date:2016-12-19
Organization:GroupServer.org
Copyright:This document is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License

Introduction

Of the visible changes to GroupServer in the Sherry release is the new Request contact page. You can get Sherry immediately.

Changes to GroupServer

In Sherry the Request contact page has been vastly improved. Finally, there have been some minor improvements.

Request contact page

The Request contact page has been updated so it now has a new HTML-formatted message, it is more robust, and better tested. The Request contact page allows group members to contact each other while also being able to lurk in peace (just read messages, without posting, and without anyone directly contacting them). If a member wants to contact someone else they can use the Request contact page to send a short message along with their contact details. If the person being contacted wishes the interaction to continue then they can reply.

The system has been largely rewritten (closing Issue 627). The new page will now send a HTML-formatted notification, along with a plain-text message (closing Issue 3409). The wording of the notification has been improved, and the page itself now uses the standard GroupServer style.

The Request contact page is now more robust with better handling of messages with Unicode characters and people that lack verified email addresses. As part of the rewrite, unit tests have been added to enhance the reliability of the page.

Internationalisation support has also been added to the page.

The Request contact notification was the last one to have an HTML message crafted, and be moved to the file-system. Creating the new notification (finally) closes Issue 269.

Acknowledgements:
 Thanks to Robert and Alice Rose for their help with the Request contact page.

Minor improvements

  • German language updates.
  • An error that prevented the Profile log (found as log.html under a profile) from being shown has been fixed.
  • An error with password-link creation in the Welcome notification that is generated by the Add member system has been fixed. (Thanks to Robert for spotting this issue.)
  • The Invite members in bulk system is now more robust, as it will handle tab separated values, as well as comma separated values (CSV), with thanks to Piers Goodhew.
  • Email addresses and web-page addresses are now omitted from the topic keywords, closing Bug 3919 and Bug 4028.
  • The image-processing code is now more robust, including the scaling of very wide and very short images, with thanks to Donald Winship for pointing out the issue.
  • The DMARC sub-domain policy is now checked when necessary, with thanks to Igor Colombi for clarifying the standard and testing.
  • Errors in the Development guide documentation have been fixed, with thanks to Nick Bell.
  • The creation of a development build of GroupServer is now easier, and better documented.
  • The favicon images have been optimised.
  • PEP 484 type hints have been added to some low-level libraries.

Get Sherry

Unreleased

To get Sherry go to the Downloads page for GroupServer and follow the GroupServer Installation documentation. Those who already have a functioning installation can update an existing GroupServer system.

Update an existing GroupServer system

To update a system running the Pastis (16.04) release of GroupServer to Sherry (YY.MM) carry out the following steps.

  1. Copy the new versions of the configuration files to your existing GroupServer installation:

    $ cp ../groupserver-yy.mm/[bivz]*cfg  .

  2. Run buildout in your existing GroupServer installation:

    $ ./bin/buildout -N

  3. Update the SQL function that generates the topic keywords:

    $ shopt -s globstar  # This makes the ** below work
$ psql -U {psql_user} -h {psql_host} {psql_dbname} -f \
  eggs/gs.group.messages.topic.base*/**/03-keywords.sql

    Where {psql_user}, {psql_host}, {psql_dbname} are the name of your PostgreSQL user, host, and database, as configured during your GroupServer installation.

  4. Restart your GroupServer instance (see Starting and stopping GroupServer).