diaspora* version 0.5.0.0 released!

After a long wait we are really happy to announce that a new major version of diaspora*, v0.5.0.0, has been released today! This is the biggest release the community has ever done, and includes many of the large features and improvements you have been waiting for.

IMPORTANT for podmins: Before upgrading, Please make sure to read and understand in full the specific 0.4.x to 0.5 upgrade guide. You will run into problems during the upgrade if you do not follow the instructions carefully!

Here is a list of the main improvements, with links to the relevant pull requests:

User experience

Redesign the contacts page, drop the “facebox” viewer and enable search for contacts directly on the page #5153 & #5473

Redesign the profile page, including automatic update after an action without reloading the page #4657 & #5180

New display for photos on the profile page #5521

Improved notification dropdown #5129 & #5237

Improved parser for Markdown formatting code #5526

Added/moved hide, block user, report and delete icons in the single-post view #5547

Show hovercards on mentions #5652

Allow users to enable/disable notifications for a post #5511 & #5722

Display poll results on reshares of the post #5782

Privacy

Exclude the content of non-public posts from notification emails #5494

Allow users to export their profile, posts and comments in JSON format #5499

Allow users to export their uploaded photos #5685

Strip EXIF data from newly uploaded images (user configurable) #5510

Allow podmins to set up a proxy to avoid external requests on images embedded with Markdown, by OpenGraph or from other pods #5386

Mobile

New profile page design with hashtags #5084

Add “#Followed tags” to the mobile menu #5468

Enable users to add/remove contacts from an aspect #5594

Under the hood

Federation improvements #5209

Major version updates to Ruby (2.1), Rails (4.2) and Sidekiq (3.3)

Admin

Make reported posts/comments accessible from the Report tab #5337

Add maintenance feature to automatically expire inactive accounts #5288

Give admins the ability to lock/unlock accounts #5643

In total this release closes 156 issues or feature tickets. A total of 20 contributors contributed code to this release in a total of 785 commits.

This release has been in release candidate status since the 30th of March and has been tested on pods during that time. As such, we are confident this release will not have major issues left. However, this release does contain many manual steps for podmins when upgrading. Please follow the steps carefully and to the letter! If in doubt, please visit our IRC channel #diaspora on Freenode and ask before continuing. Not following the instructions closely could result in unnecessary downtime for your pod.

MySQL/MariaDB pods: please note this release contains long running database migrations for these databases. Large pods should expect at least 30-60 minutes downtime due to migrations.

Please provide feedback about the release via the normal channels. We are aiming to move to releasing minor upgrades faster in the future, so bug fixes and small features can be pushed out without pods having to wait for a major release.