Hello to my magnificent Flarumites!

As we meet the month of March, it is with great merriment that I present our newest release:

Koala Relief

The bushfires in Australia have impacted the entire country, and much of the wildlife, including the world-renown koala. For this reason, and to continue honoring our Australian roots, we have chosen to code name this release Koala Relief and we've decided to donate €50 EUR ($80 AUD) each to WIRES and Australian Red Cross to support the recovery effort. If you feel the same way we do about the relief efforts, we recommend these charities to support the animal and human recovery efforts respectively. Because it might sound odd for us to spend donated money, the whole team pitched in to make this donation happen 🥰.

📣 The Release

This release contains several new items and fixes, as we continue to refine the core software on the way to our stable version.

You’ll notice this release took a little longer, because the team added an extra month to our development time to account for the holidays in December. This gave us additional time to try some additional planning techniques for our release schedule, which still need some fine tuning. We appreciate your patience with us.

🔔 What’s Changed?

We spent this release focused on changes to make the experience better for Flarum, both for the great developers in our community and for administrators of Flarum sites.

🏋️ Flarum now fully supports PHP 7.4! (flarum/core#1985)

🌏 Slugs will now support basic transliteration, transforming UTF-8 characters into more than just - in your URLs. (flarum/core#1975)

in your URLs. (flarum/core#1975) 📧 Mail settings now support Mailgun regions, and will check for incomplete settings. (flarum/core#1763), (flarum/core#1921), (flarum/core#1850)

✋ Throttling can now be avoided by granting permission to groups (admins are now immune by default). (flarum/core#1938)

🖼️ Avatars can now be uploaded again in IE11/Edge.

🚩 Users can now flag their own posts, and other improvements to flags. (flarum/flags#18)

🤸 Customizing Paths now only requires a single file named site.php to edit on new installs. (flarum/flarum#63)

🗂️ Translations will now fallback to the default language (such as en ) if there are missing strings, no more core.flarum.this.looks.weird . (flarum/core#1961)

) if there are missing strings, no more . (flarum/core#1961) 🤐 TextFormatter has been updated to version 2.3.6, which comes with the ability to add spoilers with Markdown. We still love your BBBBCode extension, 010101, don't worry. (flarum/core#1982)

There are a bunch more! If you're into this, feel free to scour our changelogs and releases on GitHub.

👨‍💻 For Developers

Due to popular request, we're including information about extension breaking changes into this announcement. Beta 12 should not break any extensions, however Beta 13 does plan several breaking changes so far.

PHP 7.1 will be deprecated in Beta 13.

Zend libraries will be completely removed by Beta 13, please update to the Laminas packages instead.

The Flarum\Util\Str class has been marked deprecated for Beta 12 and will be removed in Beta 13.

class has been marked deprecated for Beta 12 and will be removed in Beta 13. The Flarum\Event\ConfigureMiddleware event has also been marked as deprecated for Beta 12, and will be removed in Beta 13.

event has also been marked as deprecated for Beta 12, and will be removed in Beta 13. Other changes are mentioned in the Beta 12 Upgrade guide below.

Developers are recommended to check the changelogs of relating packages when they discover issues. You can review the Beta 12 Update guide to ensure your extensions are up to date.

If you have any questions or run into any obstacles in upgrading, please open a new discussion in the Dev tag or find us in #extend on our Discord.

Please also read about our flarum/core version constraint recommendation to stable.

⤴️ Upgrading

Before you run the upgrade, make sure to create a backup of your public/assets directory, your composer.json and your database!

Step 1: Ensure you are on version 0.1.0-beta.11(.1) in your Admin Dashboard or by running php flarum info (use the previous release notes for upgrading from an earlier version)

Step 2: Disable all 3rd party extensions.

Step 3: Run the following commands:

composer update --prefer-dist --no-dev -a --with-all-dependencies php flarum migrate php flarum cache:clear

Step 4: Use your newly-upgraded Flarum site!

If you run into any problems, please open a new discussion in the Support tag. There may be discussions of similar issues, but open a new one anyway, it helps us get your specific problem resolved faster.

If the problem persists – we're here to help! Make sure to mention the Flarum version you are on or the output of php flarum info .

🙇‍♀️ Acknowledgements

Flarum releases wouldn't be possible without a multitude of people, our thanks go out to all of them! Thank you...

To everyone who contributed code this release, especially @askvortsov, @ozzzzam, jbrgr, D-mata, w-4, tariqwalji, @ianm, pReya, and anyone else we've missed;

To our eagle-eyed bug reporters, especially @matteocontrini, @010101, @peopleinside, and andreasjacobsen93;

To the incredible team behind Flarum, including @Franz, @luceos, @jordanjay29, @datitisev, @clarkwinkelmann, @tankerkiller125, @Liberty, @Digital, @Pollux, @katos, @Kyrne and @Ralkage;

To every Open Collective supporter and Github Sponsor, but especially Glowing Blue AG, Sridhar Kamma, BartVB, Creators Wave, Donald Broussard, Edmilerad, FibraClick, Guitartalk, hutmate.com, Ian Morland, Maksym Tkachenko, Mark Cutting, Mikkel Rasmussen, Andrei Telteu, demianh, hrvoje-hr, Istom1n, iWanheda, Ken Lam, Lay Dominicans of bl. Michał Czartoryski, malago86, northeaster, Open Collective, tankerkiller125 and Timotheus Pakorra;

Your continued support is extremely helpful, and helps provide stable development hours for Flarum! Help us become a sustainable project by backing us!

And finally, to you for your ongoing support and enthusiasm that keeps us all going!