Version 0.11

Today we're excited to release WriteFreely v0.11! This is a huge update that includes many fixes and improvements, built-in automatic, free SSL certificates, support for our command-line client, and more moderation controls for multi-user instances.

Besides all of these improvements, this update come just over a year after our very first release, v0.1. Keep an eye out for a future post about the last year in review — a lot has happened!

Get the lastest release now (you'll notice it's v0.11.1), or jump into the updates below.

Major Features

Automatic SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt (T542)

It's now even easier to start up a WriteFreely instance with free, automatic certificates from Let's Encrypt. With the application facing the public internet (i.e. not behind a reverse proxy), you can set a few configuration values to have WriteFreely generate the certificate for you.

For new instances, choose Production, standalone > Secure (port 443), auto certificate during the interactive setup process.

For existing instances, set autocert = true and tls_cert_path = certs (see config documentation for more information).

WriteFreely Command-Line Interface

We've released our first official WriteFreely client along with this version: wf-cli! This is a simple command-line-based tool for publishing to one or many WriteFreely instances. It's perfect for tech-savvy users who don't want to leave their terminal window or anyone looking to build WriteFreely publishing into their desktop writing workflow — and it's available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and anywhere else you can build a Go application.

User-Facing Changes / Fixes

Minor Changes

Admin-Facing Changes

Developer-Facing Changes

Experimental / In-Progress Work

User Silencing (T661)

Now instance admins can silence problematic users to make their writing inaccessible to the world and prevent further publishing. This strikes a balance between preventing further abuse and making reversible moderation decisions, as users will still be able to log in to their account and access their data.

This is still experimental, as it needs more extensive testing. Please report any bugs you find and give us any feedback you have on this feature!

Reader-centric instances (T681, #157)

As part of our new Write.as for Teams service, we're experimenting with an alternative configuration for admins that want their site to be more focused on the collective work of its writers, rather than on individuals. It's meant for businesses, organizations, and institutions that want to create more of a shared blog than provide individual blog hosting. It sets the Reader view as the home page, uses blog templates with global navigation, and has hashtags search across all public blogs.

This functionality is not at all finalized, and subject to change drastically without notice. We don't recommend enabling this in your configuration unless you're merely curious or want to provide feedback (which we highly encourage!).

Upgrading from v0.10.0

Download the latest release for your operating system. Stop running your writefreely service, replace all files in your installation with the ones in the archive, and then start your writefreely service again.

Now make sure your database is backed up, and update it with writefreely --migrate.

No additional steps are needed to upgrade from v0.10.0. Follow the instructions in each previous #release if you're upgrading from an earlier version.

Developers

If you are running a custom build, note that there were style changes in this release. Run make ui to generate the latest stylesheets.

Contributors

Thanks for contributing to this release!

@robjloranger @OddBloke

#WriteFreely