Foswiki 2.1.2 Available

Some of you may wonder, “hey wait, last release was 2.1.0 and now we are at 2.1.2?” Yes right, we had to skip one patch release. At the moment we were about to publish 2.1.1 we just realized one other last urgent bug in the page cache code that we don’t want to leave you alone with. So there were are at 2.1.2.

Download it here.

This release contains about 58 fixes relative to 2.1.0, 13 of them marked urgent, and 21 regular enhancements. There is a new JQueryPlugin bundling upgrades to the 3rd party javascript libraries part of it. Fontawesome icons have been made available via %JQICON next to the already large famfamfam icons.

There is good news for public facing Foswiki systems: you can now safely disable CGI sessions for guest users to gain a noticeable performance improvement. While previous releases already had that switch, user registration and password maintenance were negatively affected. Starting with this release it is safe now to deactivate CGI sessions for guests.

There have been a couple of changes in how the “refresh” url parameter is used to force a new page to be generated: first, it has been removed from guest views to prevent crawlers from following the link and thus invalidating the cache. Second, only admin users are allowed to nuke all of the site’s page cache using refresh=all.

The footprint of CPAN packages required to run a Foswiki has been broadened a bit by adding LWP::Protocol::https (caused by an upstream packaging split). This will become increasingly important when foswiki.org is further moving towards an all-secure site using https. Documentation links to foswiki.org have been updated to use https only. Note that most other plugins available via foswiki.org still might link to the main site using plain http. We are working towards fixing this. We were not able to auto-redirect all http to https links yet as this was harming older Foswiki installations not having LWP::Protocol::https installed or which don’t trust our certificate. Stay tuned for more info on this.

Have a good time upgrading.

The Virtual machine image is updated to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and compressed with 7zip for faster downloads. Webmin has been removed from the image.

As of this release, translations of French, German, Italian, Traditional Chinese and Ukrainian are 100% complete, while Czech, Danish are at 95+%.

See complete release notes for more details.