selfoss news

2.20 – unreleased

This version currently requires PHP 7.4 or newer. (Might be increased later.)

New features

YouTube spout now accepts handles (starting with @ sign). (#1412)
YouTube spout now includes the video description. (#1412)
Mastodon share button was added. Can be enabled by adding m to share and setting mastodon pointing to your chosen instance. (#1421)
Source filters can be negated, or limited to only title or only content. (#1423)
Sources can be filtered based on item’s author, URL or categories. (#1423, #1424)
Source filter expression is now validated whenever a source is modified. (#1423)
Garbage collection can be completely disabled by setting items_lifetime=0.
Tamil (ta) translation was added.

Bug fixes

Configuration parser was changed to raw method, which relaxes the requirement to quote option values containing special characters in config.ini. (#1371)
Fix “Mark all as read” button not hiding marked articles in unread view, not updating the unread counts in menu properly, and not closing menu on mobile. (#1388
Re-added “Next” button on smartphones. (#1406
Fix compressed SVG (svgz) support. (#1418
Fix article links containing HTML-special characters. (#1407)
Reduce the chance of “Update all sources” button timing out. (#1428, #1430)
Fix a log-in loop in client. (#1429)
Fix errors in Firefox’s private browsing mode.
Fix exporting OPML when there are tags that look like numbers (#1439)
Fix incorrect handling of tags in MySQL backend, which could result in OPML export being broken (#1439)
Fix sharing to Wallabag 2. (#1465)
Fix DB migration with SQLite that has double-quote string literals disabled (like on FreeBSD). (#1489)

Customization changes

Custom spouts must explicitly pass null to Item::__construct() when they do not need the extraData argument. (#1415)
Custom spout parameter declarations should now use constants from Parameter interface. (#1409)
Custom spouts are expected to pass HtmlString object to items’ title and content. (#1368)
Spouts can fetch item contents lazily by passing a function as content to Item. (#1413)
Spouts’ name, description and params properties now require a type hint. (#1425)

Other changes

tidy PHP extension is now required if you want to use “Content extractor” spout. (#1392)
Password hashing helper page will delegate the hashing to server again. (#1401)
Content Extraction spout will no longer try to extract content we have already extracted. (#1413)
Source filters are stricter, they need to start and end with a /. (#1423)
OPML importer has been merged into the React client. (#1442)
Web requests will send Accept-Encoding header. (#1482)
Authentication system has been rewritten to allow more methods in the future. (#1491)
Authentication will now also log user out when the credentials in the config change. (#1491)
Requests from loopback IP address now give full access to all operations, not just update. Additionally, IPv6 loopback address is recognized and proxies are ignored. (#1491)

For developers

Back-end source code is now checked using PHPStan. (#1409)
Prettier is now used for code formatting. (#1493)
Several npm run scripts were renamed for consistency: analyse:server → check:server:phpstan, cs:server → check:server:cs, lint:server → check:server:lint. (#1494)

2.19 – 2022-10-12

This version requires PHP ~~5.6~~ 7.2 (see known regressions section) or newer. It is also the last version to support PHP 7.

Known regressions

Values in config.ini containing special characters need to be quoted. Will be fixed by https://github.com/fossar/selfoss/commit/ba9339372a7bc0678c6c1f74336406ab1bbb4ecb.
Updating sources that already contain items will fail on PHP < 7.2.0. Will be fixed by https://github.com/fossar/selfoss/commit/d6e9bc8b01a7d58630772f6dc9938e88a28be706.
Updating RSS sources without a valid date fails. Will be fixed by #1385.

New features

Thumbnails can be disabled (#897)
Reddit spout replaced fragile imgur heuristics with previews provided by the JSON API (#1033)
Experimental support for using selfoss offline was added. Note that this is only available in secure contexts, that is, over HTTPS, and can be very buggy. (#1014)
Long articles that do not fit on a single screen will no longer be arranged into columns, allowing for smoother reading experience (#1081)
Diaspora share button was added, you can enable it with d. (#1121)
“Copy to clipboard” share button was added, you can enable it with c. (#1142)
Native sharer is available in secure contexts in browsers that support it. You can enable it by adding a to share key in your config. (#1035)
Data directory can be configured (#1043)
New spout for searching Twitter (e.g. following hashtags) was added. (#1213)
Added option reading_speed_wpm for showing estimated reading time, set it to the number of words you can read in a minute. (#1232)
Added option db_socket for connecting to MySQL database through UNIX domain. (#1284)
Search query is now part of URL. (#1216)
A page that will pre-fill a form for adding a source with URL has been added. You can find it on https://yourselfossurl.com/manage/sources/add?url=some-feed-url. (#1310, #254)
Search will be carried out using regular expressions when the search query is wrapped in forward slashes, e.g. /regex/. The expression syntax is database specific. (#1205)
YouTube spout now supports following playlists. (#1260)
Confirmation is now required when leaving the setting page with unsaved source changes. (#1300)
Add link from settings page to individual sources and vice versa. (#1329, #1340)
Tag colour can be now changed using keyboard. (#1335)
YouTube spout now supports all YouTube URLs that provide feeds. (#1273)
Add open_in_background_tab option to try to make v shortcut open articles in a background tab (does not work in Chromium-based browsers). (#1354)
GitHub sources now include author. (#1367)
Twitter sources now indicate author using the author field rather than including in the title. (#1367)
Translations into several new languages were added:
- English (United Kingdom): en-GB
- French (Canada): fr-CA
- Galician: gl
- Hebrew: he
- Indonesian: id
- Portuguese (European): pt

Bug fixes

Reddit spout allows wider range of URLs, including absolute URLs and searches (#1033)
Improved compatibility with newer versions of PHP (#1049, #1157, #1236, #1294)
logger_level=NONE is now handled correctly (#1077)
URLs containing special characters like commas in query string are now handled correctly (#1082)
Set 60 second timeout to spout HTTP requests to prevent a single feed blocking other updates (#1104)
Significantly improved accessibility (#1133, #1134, #1141 and #1345)
Fixed marking more than 1000 items as read at the same time (#1182)
Fixed loading full text on pages containing ampersands in URLs (#1188)
Fixed missing styling in article contents (#1221)
Golem, Lightreading and Heise spouts now use Graby for extracting article contents instead of our own defunct extraction rules. (#1245)
The tag colour picker now pre-selects the current colour instead of a placeholder colour. (#1269)
OPML import now correctly handles valid files. (#1366)
OPML import will prefer title attribute over text for feed names. (#1366)
OPML import is now able to read files when the browser sends an incorrect MIME type. (#1366)

API changes

tags attribute is now consistently array of strings, numbers are numbers and booleans are booleans. This might break third-party clients that have not updated yet. (#948)
API is now versioned separately from selfoss and follows semantic versioning (#1137)
API 2.21.0: /mark now accepts list of item IDs encoded as JSON. Requests using application/x-www-form-urlencoded are deprecated. (#1182)
Dates returned as part of items now strictly follow ISO8601 format. (#1246)
The following are deprecated and will be removed in next selfoss version:
- Passing credentials in query string, use cookies instead. (#1360)
- GET /login endpoint, use POST /login. (#1360)
- GET /logout was deprecated in favour of newly introduced (API 4.1.0) DELETE /api/session/current. (#1360)
- POST /source/delete/:id in favour of DELETE /source/:id. (#1360)
API 6.0.0: Makes the author field null when an item author is not known (#1367)

Customization changes

selfoss.shares.register was removed. Instead you should set selfoss.customSharers to an object of sharer objects. The action callback is now expected to open a window on its own, instead of returning a URL. A label and a HTML code of an icon (you can use a <img> tag, inline <svg>, emoji, etc.) are now expected.

To demonstrate, if you previously had

selfoss.shares.register('moo', 'm', true, function(url, title) {
    return 'https://moo.foobar/share?u=' + encodeURIComponent(url) + '&t=' + encodeURIComponent(title);
});

in your user.js file, you will need to change it to

selfoss.customSharers = {
    'm': {
        label: 'Share using Moo',
        icon: '🚛',
        action: ({url, title}) => {
            window.open(`https://moo.foobar/share?u=${encodeURIComponent(url)}&t=${encodeURIComponent(title)}`);
        },
    },
};

(#1017, #1035, #1359)

Custom FullTextRss filter were moved to fulltextrss directory in data directory (#1043)
Spouts can now implement getSourceIcon() instead of getIcon() when icon is associated with the feed, not individual icons. (#1190)
Some language files have been renamed to use correct IETF language tag and you might need to change the language key in your config.ini:
- Simplified Chinese zh-CN
- Traditional Chinese zh-TW
- Norwegian Bokmål nb
- Swedish sv
Wallabag sharer now targets Wallabag 2 by default. This is potentially breaking change but hopefully, no one uses Wallabag 1 any more. (#1261)
defaults.ini file is no longer used, it is only provided for convenience under a new name config-example.ini (#1261, #1267)
spout classes no longer need to implement Iterator, instead they should return Iterator of newly introduced Item objects from getItems() method. The types of properties of items have also been revisited. (#1341, #1342)

Other changes

Amine and others have rewritten the Android app from scratch, you will want to install the new one from F-Droid to keep receiving updates.
The front-end has been modernized using React framework, this will greatly simplify future development. (#1216)
The front-end routing no longer relies on hash fragment, resulting in nicer URLs. (#1299)
Prevent sending referrer headers when opening links and sharing for improved privacy. (#1301)
Removed broken instapaper scraping from Reddit spout (#1033)
RSS feed will be fetched more reliably (#1052)
Guzzle is now used for Twitter as well, allowing users to install certificates on outdated hosts easily. (#1102)
More of user interface is now translatable (#1054)
Open Sans font is no longer bundled, resulting in smaller installations. Additionally, use_system_font option was removed. The typeface is still set as the default font family, so if you want to use it, install it to your devices. If you want to use a different typeface, add body { font-family: 'Foo Face'; } to your user.css. (#1072)
The file name of exported sources now includes a timestamp (#1078)
Developers, we no longer use Grunt. Build the package using npm run dist and check the code using npm run check; see the scripts section in top-level package.json. (#1093)
Developers, we are now building the styles and client-side code statically, using Parcel. If you update any such assets, you will need to run npm run build for the changes to be reflected. You can also use npm run dev to watch for asset changes. (#1137)
Developers, CSS files are now checked using stylelint and formatted using Prettier. You can use npm run lint:styles and npm run fix:styles respectively in the assets directory to run those tools. (#1153)
Google+ and del.icio.us share button were removed (#1121)
Windows 8 tiles are no longer supported. (#1137)
Strong password hashes are now supported. (#844, #1137)
RSS spout now prefers the feed logo to website favicon. (#1152)
RSS spout now tries to use favicon from the feed domain when there is no logo or home page favicon. (#1152)
Setting DEBUG to 1 in src/common.php no longer logs HTTP bodies, only headers. Set it to 2 if you need the bodies as well. (#1152)
PHP startup errors are now logged, instead of having F3 crash with Error 500 (#1195)
In order to support offline mode, we moved much of the UI to the browser. (#1150, #1184, #1215, #1216)
We carried out a significant internal refactoring (#1164, #1190)
Removed Instapaper spout since it has been broken since its acquisition. Sources using it were migrated to “RSS Feed (with content extraction)”. (#1245)
Placeholders are now used for images before they are loaded to avoid content jumping around (#1204)
Search button is now always on the screen, avoiding the need to scroll to top to be able to use it. (#1231)
Button for opening articles, tags, sources and filters in the sidebar, as well as the source and tag links in articles are now real links, allowing to open them in a new tab by middle-clicking them. (#1216, #695)
The way config.ini is parsed has changed. If you use any of the following characters ?{}|&~!()^", e.g. for database password, you will need to quote the config value like db_password="life0fD4ng3r!". This is a consequence of replacing F3 framework with PHP’s built-in INI parser. (#1261)
Removed anonymizer configuration option. (#1358)

2.18 – 2018-03-05

New features

Full-text RSS spout is now able to extract content from PDFs (#897)
URL is no longer cleaned when changing spout (#906)
It is possible to set tag or source to be opened after user logs in (#927)
Displaying multiple images from tweets with galleries is supported (#934)
Quoted tweets are supported (#934)
Logging destination can be changed (#1004)

Bug fixes

Fixed Full-text RSS spout (#897)
It is now unlikely that the client browser gets outdated JS or CSS (#907) On Lighttpd, you might need to update your configuration.
Fixed back button not working correctly on small screens (#906)
When using PostgreSQL, vacuuming is left to the database (#906)
Items from different spouts but with the same uid will not be ignored anymore (#906)
GitHub spout was modified to correctly escape the data (#906)
YouTube spout was changed to allow wider range of URLs (#915)
The items without a date will no longer be added again after clean-up (#914)
Changed favicon fetcher for RSS spout to be more resilient (#920)
Tweets are no longer truncated (#934)
Using arrow keys in photo galleries will no longer change opened item (#942)
Facebook spout is finally working again (#936)
PSR-4 autoloading is now used, fixing the compatibility with custom spouts. If you use custom spouts, please make sure to check compliance. (#959)

Other changes

Fixed compatibility with PHP 7.2 (#1005)
Improved translations (#932, #981, #985, #1003)
Changed library for handling ico files (#926)
Upgraded FancyBox, the gallery looks much slicker now (#942)
For developers: JavaScript libraries now have to be obtained using NPM (#942)
Login is now done using AJAX, a step towards progressive web app (#931)
Guzzle is used for HTTP requests making them more reliable (#936)
Ironed out some inconsistencies in database schema (#955)
For developers: JavaScript client code is now checked using eslint (#951)
Increased resolution of the favicon (#961)
Added warning when autoloader is missing (#957)
Removed redundant alt attribute from favicons (#978)
Favicons are now easier to click on mobile (#992)
Tables that do not fit into columns will now show a scrollbar (#1001)
For developers: Coding style and other code requirements can be easily checked using grunt check. (#943)
Warning will be logged when icon/thumbnail directories are not writeable (#1009)
Removed readability spout and sharing (#1012)
Switched icons to vector images, which will allow better theming (#1013)

2.17 – 2017-03-17

New features

Spout title can be fetched automatically (#851)
selfoss is now navigable (#869)
Refreshing the sources using the button no longer blocks the user interface (#846)
State of the items is synced periodically (#846)
Added option for sharing with Wallabag 2 (#887)

Notable changes

Composer is used for dependency management, if you downloaded selfoss from git repository you will need to use composer for installing dependencies. (#845)
Simplified detecting selfoss root URL which should fix some cookie problems (#889)
Made the db_port configuration key optional (#843)
Migrated to .htaccess to Apache 2.4 syntax (#833)

Bug fixes

Fixed YouTube spout (#842)
DeviantArt, Reddit, Golem and Twitter spouts changed to use HTTPS (#835)
Fixed reddit spout redirects (#835)
Fixed Wordpress emoji size on HTTPS sites (#835)
Fixed twitter links when tweet contains < (#852)
Fixed encoding problems caused by camo (#826)
Fixed “$HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA is deprecated” error when updating a single source (#841)
Fixed twitter spout error reporting (#847)
Improved error reporting for reddit spout (#860)
Removed the need for MySQL 5.6; MySQL 5.5.3 or greater is now required again (#863)
Made RSS feed generated by selfoss valid (#862)
Fixed #774 “Incorrectly calculated offset for loading new items” (#869)
Fixed code listings overflowing to different column (#889)

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