Version 0.12

We're excited to release WriteFreely v0.12, our biggest update yet! This version comes with a ton of great features for communities and organizations, and officially moves WriteFreely into the beta stage — just a few steps away from version 1.0.

Besides our new features and performance improvements, this update also includes plenty of contributions from new members of the community! Thank you to everyone who helped out, whether you contributed code or tested our release candidate!

Major Features

ActivityPub Mentions (T627)

Enable more interaction with your posts by mentioning users on Mastodon, Pleroma, and other ActivityPub platforms! Users on instances with federation enabled can now insert @handle@their.instance to mention someone. You might use this to write a long response to someone in the fediverse, or even mention your own microblogging account, so that replies to your blog post also notify you there, where you can continue the conversation.

New Admin Dashboard (T694)

We've redesigned the admin dashboard to be a little easier to navigate, and generally more user friendly. It now includes an overview of stats for your instance, dedicated pages for app settings and monitoring, and more details on what each configuration option does. We've also made it easier for admins to get to the “Invite people” page.

OAuth 2.0 Support (#225)

Now you can authenticate with your WriteFreely instance via OAuth! This is perfect for WriteFreely communities that are set up to accompany other platforms. We support three providers so far: GitLab, Slack, and Write.as.

Reader Filter Updates (#269)

Now the Reader will show the most recent 250 public posts, instead of only the last three months of public posts. This should be much more fitting for most WriteFreely instances.

Plain Text Import

Now you can import plain text files to publish them as posts on WriteFreely.

User-Facing Changes / Fixes

Minor Changes

Admin-Facing Changes

Developer-Facing Changes

Performance / Backend

Upgrading from v0.11.x and v0.12.0rc1

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 db migrate

No additional steps are needed to upgrade from v0.11.x. 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 the following command to generate the latest stylesheets:

make ui

Contributors

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release!

Development

@thebaer @robjloranger @qwazix @yalh76 @ngerakines @techknowlogick @shleeable @nkoehring @paddatrapper @cjeller1592

Documentation

@cjeller1592

Bug reports

@barbrastreisand @wakest @judges119 @laBecasse @misaka00251 @OliverViking @mrvdb @darddan @wiwie @annando

#WriteFreely