- Time in application time zone is used where appropriate in code, this fixes a bug in due date calculation for zones offset from UTC (Louise Crow)
- Prevent long authority names overflowing on statistics page (Gareth Rees)
- Fix css bug which allowed some "visually-hidden" elements to affect page length (Liz Conlan)
- Header now contains pull-down menu for user-specific links, which has swapped place with the search box (Martin Wright)
- This release rolls out the first implementation of Alaveteli Pro - a service for use by journalists and campaigners. Includes ability to embargo requests, and dashboard for managing to-do items and requests. This is functionality being piloted in the UK and is not yet recommended for use in other locales (Steve Day, Martin Wright, Louise Crow)
-
Please update any overriden templates and theme code that reference times and dates to reference the local time zone where appropriate. e.g.
Time.now => Time.zone.now Date.today => Date.current DateTime.parse => Time.zone.parse
See https://robots.thoughtbot.com/its-about-time-zones for a description of how Rails handles time zones
-
To store the significant dates for requests in the database, you must run
bundle exec rake temp:populate_request_due_datesafter deployment. -
There are some database structure updates so remember to
rake db:migrate
app/views/admin_holiday_imports/new.html.erb
app/views/admin_public_body/edit.html.erb
app/views/admin_request/edit.html.erb
app/views/admin_request/show.html.erb
app/views/comment/_single_comment.html.erb
app/views/comment/_single_comment.text.erb
app/views/comment/new.html.erb
app/views/followups/_followup.html.erb
app/views/followups/new.html.erb
app/views/general/_advanced_search_tips.html.erb
app/views/general/_frontpage_search_box.html.erb
app/views/general/_responsive_header.html.erb
app/views/general/_responsive_topnav.html.erb
app/views/general/blog.html.erb
app/views/general/search.html.erb
app/views/info_request_batch/show.html.erb
app/views/layouts/default.html.erb
app/views/public_body/_body_listing_single.html.erb
app/views/request/_after_actions.html.erb
app/views/request/_bubble.html.erb
app/views/request/_describe_state.html.erb
app/views/request/_incoming_correspondence.html.erb
app/views/request/_incoming_correspondence.text.erb
app/views/request/_other_describe_state.html.erb
app/views/request/_outgoing_correspondence.html.erb
app/views/request/_outgoing_correspondence.text.erb
app/views/request/_request_sent.html.erb
app/views/request/_sidebar.html.erb
app/views/request/_wall_listing.html.erb
app/views/request/describe_notices/_successful.html.erb
app/views/request/hidden.html.erb
app/views/request/new.html.erb
app/views/request/show.html.erb
app/views/user/_user_listing_single.html.erb
app/views/user/banned.html.erb
app/views/user/rate_limited.html.erb
app/views/user/show.html.erb
app/views/widgets/show.html.erb
- Updated translations from Transifex (Louise Crow)
- This hotfix just includes translation updates.
- Fix a bug in the handling of incoming mail with no body, just attachments (Louise Crow)
- Apply text masks and censor rules to attachments when downloading a whole request as a Zip file (Louise Crow, Gareth Rees)
- Check what information may have been released by auditing cached zip
downloads:
bundle exec rake temp:audit_cached_zip_downloads_with_censor_rules. Save this information somewhere to refer back to. - Clear all cached Zip downloads so that masks and censor rules are applied the
next time they are accessed:
bundle exec rake temp:remove_cached_zip_downloads.
- Added an instruction line to the translation source to warn against using double quotes for the email name translation string (Liz Conlan)
- Updated translations for Italy and Nepal (Liz Conlan)
- This hotfix just includes translation updates.
- Updated translations for Italian locales (Liz Conlan)
- This hotfix just includes translation updates.
- Updated translations for Italian translations to fix a bug that prevents mail sending from working properly if there are double quotes in the string used when constructing to email's to field (Liz Conlan)
- This hotfix just includes translation updates.
- Updated translations (Liz Conlan)
- This hotfix just includes translation updates.
- Minor tweaks to unify the action bars used on the authority and request pages (Martin Wright)
- Added the new action menu to the bottom of the correspondence thread after user feedback (Gareth Rees)
- This hotfix just makes a couple of template and style tweaks. You may need to update styles for the authority and request page action bars.
app/views/admin_public_body/edit.html.erb
app/views/widgets/show.html.erb
- Moved user actions to an "action menu" on the request pages (Martin Wright, Gareth Rees, Liz Conlan)
- Added sorting to admin users list (Gareth Rees)
- Add
requiredattribute to select authority form to prevent blank searches (Gareth Rees) - Make spam term checking configurable (Gareth Rees)
- Exclude banned users from graphs and stats tasks (Liz Conlan)
- New statistics page that includes user stats to show top requesters and
annotators, and hidden requests. Includes a new event type of "hide" to
make tracking and reporting on hidden requests much simpler. Need to run
rake temp:update_hide_event_typeto set up the data for this feature (Henare Degan, Luke Bacon) - Added task to export last 2 days of requests (
cleanup:spam_requests) (Gareth Rees) - Added admin comments list page (Gareth Rees)
- Add "banned" label to banned users in admin users list for better visibility (Gareth Rees)
- Fix request counts for authorities on the body stats page (Henare Degan)
- Cached mail server log delivery status (Liz Conlan, Gareth Rees)
- Improved display of authority list in search results (Martin Wright)
- Added favicon to
admin,no_chromeand attachment to html layouts (Gareth Rees) - Search for requests made to a tagged set of public authorities (Henare Degan)
- Allow format to be parsed correctly so JSON searches work (Henare Degan)
- Improve styling of request status messages (Martin Wright)
- Stopped HTML Entities being included in emails (Liz Conlan)
- Added support for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) (Louise Crow)
- Stopped including the original mail in bounce messages to prevent us redistributing spam (Louise Crow)
- Added more modern request status icons from the default Alaveteli theme (Louise Crow)
- Made search interfaces more consistent (Martin Wright, Louise Crow)
- Added a package to automate updating the geoip databases (Henare Degan)
- New requests are now recorded as virtual pageviews in Google Analytics (Louise Crow)
- Fixed broken table cell markup (Luke Bacon)
- Added an admin link to outgoing correspondence (Gareth Rees)
- Fixed some minor bugs on the admin debug page (Henare Degan)
- Moved Javascript to end of body tag (Louse Crow)
- Improve Public Body import from CSV documentation and page layout (Liz Conlan, Gareth Rees)
- Apache and nginx example files now have far-future expiration dates for static assets to allow browser-based caching (Louise Crow)
- Improved design of request correspondence boxes (Martin Wright).
- Improved the listing of similar requests in the request page sidebar (Martin Wright)
- Added a "Make a Request" call to action to the sidebar of the request pages (Martin Wright)
- Fixed some missing markup on request description notices (Sam Smith)
- Improved wording of lists of requests requiring attention on the admin summary page (Louise Crow)
- Added strong parameters gem for better mass assignment security (Gareth Rees)
- Added experimental Xapian database replication (Hazel Smith, Louise Crow)
- Request prominence logic more consistent, embargoed requests introduced as an Alaveteli Pro feature (Louise Crow)
- To cache delivery status of existing mail server logs run
bundle exec rake temp:cache_delivery_statusafter deployment. InfoRequest.last_public_response_clause,InfoRequest.old_unclassified_params,InfoRequest.count_old_unclassified,InfoRequest.get_random_old_unclassifiedandInfoRequest.find_old_unclassifiedhave been removed. UseInfoRequest.where_old_unclassifiedand additional ARel query methods where necessary.- You can improve the speed of your site by making sure that far-future expiration dates
are being set on static assets - see the examples in the example config files (
config/ httpd.conf-exampleandconfig/nginx.conf.example). - Install the
geoip-database-contribpackage to automatically fetch latest geoip databases. - To make requests searchable based on their public body's tags you'll need to
reindex Xapian. To make this quicker you can selectively reindex just the
model and new term by running
bundle exec rake xapian:rebuild_index models="InfoRequestEvent" terms="X" - To update events to use the new 'hide' event type you need to run
rake temp:update_hide_event_type - If you've added Javascript to overriden view templates, you should wrap it
in a
content_for :javascriptblock. See http://api.rubyonrails.org/v3.2.22/classes/ActionView/Helpers/CaptureHelper.html#method-i-content_for for more information. - If you've overridden models that use
attr_accessibleorattr_protected, you'll need to update them as per the [strong parameters migration guide] (https://github.com/rails/strong_parameters#migration-path-to-rails-4). - There are some database structure updates so remember to
rake db:migrate
app/views/admin_general/_admin_navbar.html.erb
app/views/admin_general/debug.html.erb
app/views/admin_general/index.html.erb
app/views/admin_public_body/edit.html.erb
app/views/admin_public_body/import_csv.html.erb
app/views/admin_public_body/new.html.erb
app/views/admin_user/_user_table.html.erb
app/views/admin_user/index.html.erb
app/views/comment/_single_comment.html.erb
app/views/contact_mailer/add_public_body.text.erb
app/views/contact_mailer/to_admin_message.text.erb
app/views/contact_mailer/update_public_body_email.text.erb
app/views/contact_mailer/user_message.text.erb
app/views/general/_advanced_search_tips.html.erb
app/views/general/_footer.html.erb
app/views/general/_frontpage_hero.html.erb
app/views/general/_localised_datepicker.html.erb
app/views/general/_new_request.html.erb
app/views/general/_popup_banner.html.erb
app/views/general/blog.html.erb
app/views/general/search.html.erb
app/views/info_request_batch_mailer/batch_sent.text.erb
app/views/layouts/admin.html.erb
app/views/layouts/default.html.erb
app/views/layouts/no_chrome.html.erb
app/views/outgoing_mailer/initial_request.text.erb
app/views/public_body/_body_listing_single.html.erb
app/views/public_body/_list_sidebar_extra.html.erb
app/views/public_body/_search_ahead.html.erb
app/views/public_body/statistics.html.erb
app/views/public_body/view_email.html.erb
app/views/public_body/view_email_captcha.html.erb
app/views/request/_bubble.html.erb
app/views/request/_incoming_correspondence.html.erb
app/views/request/_outgoing_correspondence.html.erb
app/views/request/_request_listing.html.erb
app/views/request/_sidebar.html.erb
app/views/request/_view_html_stylesheet.html.erb
app/views/request/describe_notices/_requires_admin.html.erb
app/views/request/new.html.erb
app/views/request/select_authorities.html.erb
app/views/request/select_authority.html.erb
app/views/request/show.html.erb
app/views/request_game/play.html.erb
app/views/request_mailer/comment_on_alert.text.erb
app/views/request_mailer/comment_on_alert_plural.text.erb
app/views/request_mailer/new_response.text.erb
app/views/request_mailer/new_response_reminder_alert.text.erb
app/views/request_mailer/not_clarified_alert.text.erb
app/views/request_mailer/old_unclassified_updated.text.erb
app/views/request_mailer/overdue_alert.text.erb
app/views/request_mailer/stopped_responses.text.erb
app/views/request_mailer/very_overdue_alert.text.erb
app/views/track_mailer/event_digest.text.erb
app/views/user/set_crop_profile_photo.html.erb
app/views/user_mailer/already_registered.text.erb
app/views/user_mailer/changeemail_already_used.text.erb
app/views/user_mailer/changeemail_confirm.text.erb
app/views/user_mailer/confirm_login.text.erb
- Added an IP rate limiter and rate limit signups to 3 per hour per IP if
ENABLE_ANTI_SPAMis configured (Gareth Rees) - Added a reCAPTCHA to the new request process for users who are not signed in,
or have not been marked as
confirmed_not_spam. This is controlled independently throughNEW_REQUEST_RECAPTCHA(Louise Crow, Gareth Rees) - Allow the additional anti-spam measures to be turned on and off by setting
ENABLE_ANTI_SPAM(Louise Crow) - Ability to block requests from country-based IP ranges. See
RESTRICTED_COUNTRIESinconfig/general.yml-examplefor details (Louise Crow) - Requests, about me text and comments are rejected if they match known spam patterns (Louise Crow)
- User-supplied links are now
rel=nofollow(Louise Crow) - Remove banned users from the search index to prevent them appearing in search results (Gareth Rees)
- Run
bundle exec rake cleanup:reindex_spam_usersto reindex banned users.
- Compress all images to improve PageSpeed (Martin Wright)
- Prevent spam users using the "about me" page to propagate spam (Gareth Rees)
- Format incoming message HTML with
<p>and<br>tags (Liz Conlan) - Add an interface to calculate transaction stats per user (Gareth Rees)
- Fixed bug in
OutgoingMessage.template_changedwhich allowed a new request to be submitted without changes to the default text if:- the site (theme) overrode the core default text via
default_letter - the authority name contained any characters which were encoded as HTMLEntities
- a global censor rule changed the template text Only the first case is known to affect a live site (Liz Conlan)
- the site (theme) overrode the core default text via
- There is now the ability to flag a request to have incoming mail rejected at SMTP time - requires special configuration at the MTA level. For more information on usage, see the documentation on spam handling (Louise Crow)
- The raw email associated with an incoming message can now be downloaded from the admin page for that message without having to view the raw email first (Louise Crow)
- Improve sharing options on request sidebar (Gareth Rees, Martin Wright)
- Added a library to give a spam score to a user (Gareth Rees)
- Add ARIA landmark roles to improve accessibility (Martin Wright)
- Add an endpoint to view outgoing message mail server logs and display them in the request thread (Gareth Rees)
- Prevent the search and list routes from processing non-HTML requests (Liz Conlan)
- Add accepted formats to commonly probed routes (Gareth Rees)
- Added a helper and new lib file to standardise click tracking with Google Analytics events (Liz Conlan)
- Migrated from using the legacy
ga.jsGoogle Analytics code to the current "universal"analytics.jsversion (Liz Conlan) - Bug fixes for the graph generation scripts (Liz Conlan)
- Improved DMARC handling (Louise Crow)
- Added a workaround for a compatibility issue with Xapian character encoding (Louise Crow)
- Minor accessibility improvements (Martin Wright)
- Add a task to output a CSV of the requests made to the top 20 authorities (Nick Jackson)
- Allow local code coverage to be generated by setting
COVERAGE=localin the environment when running rspec (Liz Conlan) - Refactored
OutgoingMailerto get "To:", "From:" and "Subject:" from theOutgoingMessageinstance (Gareth Rees) - Show the delivery status of outgoing messages (Gareth Rees, Zarino Zappia)
- Added a rake task,
themes:check_help_sectionsto identify missing help templates and sections in themes that are referred to in Alaveteli. Removed example help templates from core toalavetelitheme. (Louise Crow) - Added a new config option
ENABLE_ANNOTATIONSto allow turning off the annotations feature (comments on requests) (Steve Day, Gareth Rees) - Added some early-stage scripts (
script/current-theme,script/diff-theme-override) to help with upgrading theme overrides. Both have a-hoption with usage information (Gareth Rees) - Make it clearer that user's names will be displayed in public (Gareth Rees)
- The holding pen is now hidden by default in the front end interface (Louise Crow)
UserController#set_profile_about_mehas been deprecated. If you have overridden it in your theme, you will need to port your customisations toUserProfile::AboutMeController. You should also updateset_profile_about_meroutes toedit_profile_about_me(for GET requests) andprofile_about_me(for PUT requests).AboutMeValidatorhas been deprecated. The behaviour is now directly included inUser.- Run
bundle exec rake themes:check_help_sectionsto check that your theme contains all the necessary help files. The example files have now been moved from Alaveteli to the example themealavetelitheme. - The upgrade of Google Analytics affects any custom GA scripts embedded in
template pages. You will need to go through your theme customisations to see
whether or not you are affected. Changes include:
- There is no longer a
pageTrackerobject on the page, you must make your calls againstgainstead - Core function calls like
_getTrackerand_trackEventhave been replaced by newer equivalents - The main method of tracking page views has changed from
pageTracker._trackPageView()toga('send', 'pageview') - The main method of sending tracking events has changed from
pageTracker._trackEvent(category, action)toga('send', 'event', category, action)Full information on how to check and adjust for these changes is available in Google's migration guide
- There is no longer a
- There are some database structure updates so remember to
rake db:migrate - This release includes an update to the commonlib submodule - you
should be warned about this when running
rails-post-deploy.
The following templates have been changed. Please update overrides in your theme to match the new templates.
app/views/admin_censor_rule/_show.html.erb
app/views/admin_censor_rule/edit.html.erb
app/views/admin_holidays/_edit_form.html.erb
app/views/admin_incoming_message/_actions.html.erb
app/views/admin_incoming_message/bulk_destroy.html.erb
app/views/admin_outgoing_message/edit.html.erb
app/views/admin_public_body_categories/edit.html.erb
app/views/admin_public_body_headings/edit.html.erb
app/views/admin_raw_email/show.html.erb
app/views/admin_request/edit.html.erb
app/views/admin_request/show.html.erb
app/views/admin_spam_addresses/index.html.erb
app/views/admin_track/_some_tracks.html.erb
app/views/admin_user/_form.html.erb
app/views/admin_user/show.html.erb
app/views/comment/_single_comment.html.erb
app/views/followups/_followup.html.erb
app/views/followups/new.html.erb
app/views/followups/preview.html.erb
app/views/general/_advanced_search_tips.html.erb
app/views/general/_footer.html.erb
app/views/general/_frontpage_how_it_works.html.erb
app/views/general/_frontpage_search_box.html.erb
app/views/general/_header.html.erb
app/views/general/_responsive_footer.html.erb
app/views/general/_responsive_header.html.erb
app/views/general/_responsive_topnav.html.erb
app/views/general/_topnav.html.erb
app/views/general/blog.html.erb
app/views/general/exception_caught.html.erb
app/views/general/search.html.erb
app/views/help/_sidebar.html.erb
app/views/help/_why_they_should_reply_by_email.html.erb
app/views/help/about.html.erb
app/views/help/alaveteli.html.erb
app/views/help/api.html.erb
app/views/help/contact.html.erb
app/views/help/credits.html.erb
app/views/help/officers.html.erb
app/views/help/privacy.html.erb
app/views/help/requesting.html.erb
app/views/help/unhappy.html.erb
app/views/info_request_batch/_batch_sent.html.erb
app/views/layouts/default.html.erb
app/views/one_time_passwords/show.html.erb
app/views/public_body/_list_sidebar_extra.html.erb
app/views/public_body/list.html.erb
app/views/public_body/show.html.erb
app/views/request/_act.html.erb
app/views/request/_after_actions.html.erb
app/views/request/_outgoing_correspondence.html.erb
app/views/request/_request_sent.html.erb
app/views/request/_sidebar.html.erb
app/views/request/_wall_listing.html.erb
app/views/request/describe_notices/_internal_review.html.erb
app/views/request/describe_notices/_not_held.html.erb
app/views/request/describe_notices/_successful.html.erb
app/views/request/details.html.erb
app/views/request/new.html.erb
app/views/request/preview.html.erb
app/views/request/select_authority.html.erb
app/views/request/show.html.erb
app/views/request_game/play.html.erb
app/views/request_mailer/requires_admin.text.erb
app/views/user/_show_user_info.html.erb
app/views/user/_signup.html.erb
app/views/user/_user_listing_single.html.erb
app/views/user/banned.html.erb
app/views/user/contact.html.erb
app/views/user/no_cookies.html.erb
app/views/user/river.html.erb
app/views/user/set_draft_profile_photo.html.erb
app/views/user/show.html.erb
app/views/user/wall.html.erb
app/views/widgets/show.html.erb
- Removed many cases of dynamic string composition, making Alaveteli easier to localise (Liz Conlan, Louise Crow).
- Please update any overridden templates in the list below so that the phrases in them will be translated correctly.
The following templates have been changed. Please update overrides in your theme to match the new templates.
app/views/comment/_single_comment.html.erb
app/views/comment/new.html.erb
app/views/contact_mailer/to_admin_message.text.erb
app/views/followups/new.html.erb
app/views/public_body/_body_listing_single.html.erb
app/views/public_body/view_email.html.erb
app/views/request/new_bad_contact.html.erb
app/views/request/show.html.erb
app/views/request/similar.html.erb
app/views/request/upload_response.html.erb
app/views/request_mailer/requires_admin.text.erb
app/views/user/show.html.erb
app/views/user/sign.html.erb
app/views/user/wrong_user_unknown_email.html.erb
- Stopped enforcing line lengths in plain text emails for a better experience when using small screen clients such as mobile phones (Liz Conlan)
- Added Google Analytics tracking code to log an event when a widget button is clicked (Liz Conlan)
- Fix crash when neither Geoip nor Gaze are configured (Alfonso Cora)
- Added a system of checkboxes to allow admins to delete multiple incoming messages (ie spam) that are associated with a request (Liz Conlan)
- Added a new cron job to run the holding pen cleanup task once a week. (Liz Conlan)
- Improved the holiday reminder email that gets sent to site admins once a year (Liz Conlan)
- Extracted
ResponseController#show_responsein to several actions in a newFollowupsController(Liz Conlan, Gareth Rees) - Added links to AskTheEU from Alaveteli sites installed in an EU country (Gareth Rees)
- Stopped generating code coverage reports locally. You can still view code coverage reports on https://coveralls.io/github/mysociety/alaveteli (Gareth Rees)
- Added
OutgoingMessage::Templatemodule and extracted templates to classes in this module (Gareth Rees) - Added some experimental methods for sending requests to an external reviewer (Gareth Rees)
- Added some experimental methods for retrieving exim mail server logs for a
specific
OutgoingMessage(Gareth Rees) - Improved the organisation of the items in the admin nav bar (Gareth Rees)
- Global and Public Body censor rules can now be managed through the admin UI (Gareth Rees)
- Added non-destructive methods to apply censor rules and text masks (Gareth Rees).
- Improve handling of long translations in logged in nav (Zarino Zappia)
- Better support for setting up a thin cluster (Liz Conlan)
- Added onscreen instructions to the Vagrant box (Liz Conlan)
- The UK-specific
SPECIAL_REPLY_VERY_LATE_AFTER_DAYShas been removed. See mysociety/whatdotheyknow-theme#287 for how we've re-implemented this in WhatDoTheyKnow. - Stop outgoing messages being displayed with forced line breaks (Liz Conlan).
- Reduce risk of duplicate request urls (Liz Conlan).
- Better image for pages when shared on Facebook (Zarino Zappia)
- Official support added for ruby 2.1.5 and 2.3.0 (Louise Crow)
- Ported the graph generation shell scripts to Ruby (Liz Conlan)
- Official support added for Debian Jessie (Liz Conlan)
- Improved some translation strings and added some missing wrappers (Gareth Rees)
- Deprecated some UK-specific code (Gareth Rees)
- Improve speed of the 'old unclassified' requests query by adding a cached field to InfoRequest to keep track of when the last public response was made (Liz Conlan).
- Improved error messages in
script/switch-theme.rb(Zarino Zappia)
-
The following methods have been replaced:
CensorRule#apply_to_text!:CensorRule#apply_to_textCensorRule#apply_to_binary!:CensorRule#apply_to_binaryIncomingMessage#apply_masks!:IncomingMessage#apply_masksInfoRequest#apply_censor_rules_to_text!:InfoRequest#apply_censor_rules_to_textInfoRequest#apply_censor_rules_to_binary!:InfoRequest#apply_censor_rules_to_binaryAlaveteliTextMasker#apply_masks!:AlaveteliTextMasker#apply_masksAlaveteliTextMasker#apply_pdf_masks!:AlaveteliTextMasker#apply_pdf_masksAlaveteliTextMasker#apply_binary_masks!:AlaveteliTextMasker#apply_binary_masksAlaveteliTextMasker#apply_text_masks!:AlaveteliTextMasker#apply_text_masks
Note that you will need to assign the return value from the new methods, e.g:
- censor_rule.apply_to_text!(text)
+ censored_text = censor_rule.apply_to_text(text)- To switch to running multiple thin servers with nginx:
- stop the running processes using
service alaveteli stop - regenerate your SysVinit daemon file using the instructions at: http://alaveteli.org/docs/installing/manual_install/#thin (but don't restart the site yet!)
- Edit the upstream alaveteli directive in your
/etc/nginx/sites-available/alaveteli_https(or/etc/nginx/sites-available/alaveteliif you are not running your site over SSL) file as per http://alaveteli.org/docs/installing/manual_install/#running-over-ssl so that nginx knows how to use the extra server processes - restart your site with
service alaveteli start
- stop the running processes using
- There's been a minor change to
config/sysvinit-passenger.example. You should regenerate this file: http://alaveteli.org/docs/installing/manual_install/#passenger - Add a 256x256 image named
logo-opengraph.pngtoYOUR_THEME_ROOT/assets/images, to be shown next to pages from your site when shared on Facebook. - The crontab needs to be regenerated to include the new modifications: http://alaveteli.org/docs/installing/manual_install/#generate-crontab
- 5af81d905 includes a migration that runs over all info requests in the database. This might take some time, so you should ideally schedule this outside of busy periods.
The following templates have been changed. Please update overrides in your theme to match the new templates.
app/views/admin_censor_rule/_form.html.erb
app/views/admin_censor_rule/_show.html.erb
app/views/admin_censor_rule/edit.html.erb
app/views/admin_censor_rule/new.html.erb
app/views/admin_general/_admin_navbar.html.erb
app/views/admin_general/stats.html.erb
app/views/admin_public_body/show.html.erb
app/views/admin_request/show.html.erb
app/views/comment/new.html.erb
app/views/comment/preview.html.erb
app/views/general/_responsive_footer.html.erb
app/views/help/unhappy.html.erb
app/views/info_request_batch/show.html.erb
app/views/layouts/contact_mailer.text.erb
app/views/layouts/default.html.erb
app/views/layouts/outgoing_mailer.text.erb
app/views/layouts/request_mailer.text.erb
app/views/layouts/user_mailer.text.erb
app/views/outgoing_mailer/_followup_footer.text.erb
app/views/public_body/_body_listing_single.html.erb
app/views/public_body/_list_sidebar_extra.html.erb
app/views/public_body/list.html.erb
app/views/public_body/show.html.erb
app/views/public_body/statistics.html.erb
app/views/public_body/view_email.html.erb
app/views/public_body_change_requests/new.html.erb
app/views/reports/new.html.erb
app/views/request/_after_actions.html.erb
app/views/request/_followup.html.erb
app/views/request/_hidden_correspondence.html.erb
app/views/request/_hidden_correspondence.text.erb
app/views/request/_incoming_correspondence.html.erb
app/views/request/_other_describe_state.html.erb
app/views/request/_outgoing_correspondence.html.erb
app/views/request/_request_sent.html.erb
app/views/request/_restricted_correspondence.html.erb
app/views/request/_sidebar.html.erb
app/views/request/_sidebar_request_listing.html.erb
app/views/request/batch_not_allowed.html.erb
app/views/request/describe_state_message.html.erb
app/views/request/details.html.erb
app/views/request/followup_bad.html.erb
app/views/request/followup_preview.html.erb
app/views/request/hidden.html.erb
app/views/request/new.html.erb
app/views/request/preview.html.erb
app/views/request/select_authority.html.erb
app/views/request/show.html.erb
app/views/request/show.text.erb
app/views/request/show_response.html.erb
app/views/request/similar.html.erb
app/views/request/upload_response.html.erb
app/views/request_mailer/overdue_alert.text.erb
app/views/request_mailer/very_overdue_alert.text.erb
app/views/track/_tracking_links.html.erb
app/views/track_mailer/event_digest.text.erb
app/views/user/_change_receive_email.html.erb
app/views/user/_signin.html.erb
app/views/user/_signup.html.erb
app/views/user/_user_listing_single.html.erb
app/views/user/rate_limited.html.erb
app/views/user/set_profile_about_me.html.erb
app/views/user/show.html.erb
app/views/user/sign.html.erb
app/views/user/signchangeemail.html.erb
app/views/user/signchangepassword.html.erb
app/views/user/signchangepassword_confirm.html.erb
app/views/user/signchangepassword_send_confirm.html.erb
app/views/user/wall.html.erb
app/views/user/wrong_user.html.erb
app/views/user_mailer/confirm_login.text.erb
app/views/widgets/show.html.erb
- Improve speed of the 'old unclassified' requests query by adding a cached field to InfoRequest to keep track of when the last public response was made (Liz Conlan).
- There are a couple of database structure updates so remember to rake db:migrate
- Remove blocks of spaces in translation strings (Louise Crow).
- There should be no action necessary.
- Various major design and markup improvements to the layout, home page and request page (Martin Wright).
- Adds basic opt-in two factor authentication. Enable it globally with
ENABLE_TWO_FACTOR_AUTH(Gareth Rees). - Fixes a bug which caused request titles to be HTML escaped twice when setting up a new request track while not logged in (Liz Conlan).
- Extracted UserController#signchangepassword to PasswordChangesController (Gareth Rees).
- Added configuration for
RESTRICT_NEW_RESPONSES_ON_OLD_REQUESTS_AFTER_MONTHS. (Gareth Rees). - Performance improvements when finding sibling info request events (Gareth Rees).
- Increased the maximum length of a track query and added a warning if this new limit is exceeded (Liz Conlan).
- Refactor of
InfoRequest(Liz Conlan). - Improved placeholder logo (Zarino Zappia).
- Improve mobile layout on authority list page (Martin Wright).
- Improve handling of associated records when destroying parents (Liz Conlan).
- Major refactoring of
InfoRequest#receive(Gareth Rees). - Santitze invalid UTF-8 in mail server logs while processing them (Steven Day, Gareth Rees).
- Fixes for several edge case bugs (Liz Conlan).
- Add more classes to markup to make style customisation easier (Martin Wright).
- Adds reCAPTCHA to the public authority change request form if there is no logged in user (Gareth Rees).
- Rename #follow_box to #track-request to prevent add blockers hiding the button allowing users to follow a request (Martin Wright).
- Improved handling of invalid UTF-8 attachment text (Louise Crow).
- Add domain to exception notification subject line (Gareth Rees).
- Fixes incorrectly updating
url_namewhen a banned user record is updated (Gareth Rees). - Definition lists are now easier to read and follow, greatly improves help pages (Martin Wright).
- The sorting on PublicBodyController#list now uses
COLLATEto sort in the correct order for a locale if a collation is available for the language. See http://alaveteli.org/docs/developers/i18n/#internationalised-sorting for adding collations. This requires PostgreSQL >= 9.1.12. (Gareth Rees) - The new widget template can now be translated (Gareth Rees).
- Improved locale switcher markup and code (Martin Wright, Gareth Rees).
- OpenGraph markup added to improve the appearance of Alaveteli links on social media (Owen Blacker).
- Request graph cron job no longer errors if there are no requests in a particular state (Petter Reinholdtsen).
- Refactoring of user controller for shorter methods and clearer syntax (Caleb Tutty)
- New rake task stats:list_hidden for printing a list of requests with hidden material (Louise Crow).
- Rspec is upgraded to version 3, and specs have been upgraded to modern syntax (Louise Crow).
- Standard filters and parameter whitelisting added to admin controllers (James McKinney, Louise Crow)
- Alaveteli now uses a local GeoIP database by default to find the country for HTTP requests (and tell users if there is an Alaveteli in their country), rather than the mySociety Gaze service. This should improve performance and reliability (Ian Chard).
- The 'Return-Path' header for mails from users is now set to an email address on the Alaveteli domain so that SPF checks should pass (Louise Crow).
- Debian Squeeze is no longer supported as an OS to run Alaveteli on. It is end-of-life in Feb 2016 and only packages Ruby 1.8.
-
Version 0.23 does not support Ruby 1.8.7.
-
If you are running Alaveteli on Debian Squeeze, you should upgrade your OS to Debian Wheezy before upgrading to this release. This Debian upgrade guide can guide you through the process. If you have questions about upgrading OS, please don't hesitate to ask on the alaveteli-dev group. If you're not ready to upgrade to Wheezy, you can still upgrade Alaveteli if you install Ruby 1.9 or 2.0 yourself, but be aware that we will no longer be testing package installation on Squeeze and that OS security updates will no longer be produced by Debian after Feb 2016.
-
The install script
site-specific-install.shsets the default ruby to 1.9. You can do this manually with the same commands http://git.io/vlDpb -
If you are running Debian Wheezy, install poppler-utils from wheezy-backports: http://git.io/vlD1k
-
This release adds
geoip-databaseto the list of required packages. You can install it withsudo apt-get install geoip-database. If you don't want to or can't use a local GeoIP database, setGEOIP_DATABASE' to an empty string inconfig/general.yml`. -
Make sure that your 'blackhole email address' is configured to be discarded by your MTA - see our postfix and exim setup documentation.
-
This release introduces a new default homepage - if you want to keep your existing homepage layout, copy the old homepage templates to your theme before upgrading and check that you have translations for them in your
theme-localedirectory. -
UserController#signchangepasswordhas been deprecated and password changing moved to a separate controller,PasswordChangesController. If you still need the old action, add the following route to your theme'slib/config/custom_routes.rb:match '/profile/change_password' => 'user#signchangepassword', :as => :signchangepassword
If you do this, you'll also need to change any url helpers from
new_password_change_pathtosignchangepassword_path. -
This release takes the first steps to deprecate the
link_button_greenclass, which will be removed in a future release. We've added contextually relevant classes to these elements. Please update your themes to ensure you're no longer usinglink_button_greenfor styling. -
The
InfoRequestmethodslaw_used_short,law_used_actandlaw_used_with_ahave been deprecated and will be removed in a future release. The new methodlaw_used_humanhas been supplied instead which takes a key to access the equivalent information of the original methods, e.g.law_used_human(:full),law_used_human(:short)etc. As thelaw_used_with_afunctionality does not appear to be in use, if you do still need this functionality in future you may need to override theLAW_USED_READABLE_DATAhash to ensure it has a:with_akey value pair for each law you are supporting before callinglaw_used_human(:with_a). -
Please upgrade the syntax in any theme specs you have to be compatible with rspec 3. Useful resources:
-
There are a couple of database structure updates so remember to
rake db:migrate -
This release includes an update to the commonlib submodule - you should be warned about this when running rails-post-deploy.
The following templates have been changed. Please update overrides in your theme to match the new templates.
app/views/admin_public_body/_locale_fields.html.erb
app/views/admin_public_body/edit.html.erb
app/views/admin_public_body_categories/_form.html.erb
app/views/admin_public_body_categories/_locale_fields.html.erb
app/views/admin_public_body_categories/edit.html.erb
app/views/admin_public_body_categories/new.html.erb
app/views/admin_public_body_headings/_form.html.erb
app/views/admin_public_body_headings/_locale_fields.html.erb
app/views/admin_public_body_headings/edit.html.erb
app/views/admin_public_body_headings/new.html.erb
app/views/admin_request/edit.html.erb
app/views/admin_request/show.html.erb
app/views/general/_advanced_search_tips.html.erb
app/views/general/_footer.html.erb
app/views/general/_frontpage_bodies_list.html.erb
app/views/general/_frontpage_intro_sentence.html.erb
app/views/general/_frontpage_new_request.html.erb
app/views/general/_frontpage_requests_list.html.erb
app/views/general/_frontpage_search_box.html.erb
app/views/general/_header.html.erb
app/views/general/_locale_switcher.html.erb
app/views/general/_responsive_credits.html.erb
app/views/general/_responsive_footer.html.erb
app/views/general/_responsive_header.html.erb
app/views/general/_responsive_topnav.html.erb
app/views/general/_topnav.html.erb
app/views/general/blog.html.erb
app/views/general/exception_caught.html.erb
app/views/general/frontpage.html.erb
app/views/general/search.html.erb
app/views/help/_sidebar.html.erb
app/views/help/about.html.erb
app/views/help/alaveteli.html.erb
app/views/help/api.html.erb
app/views/help/contact.html.erb
app/views/help/credits.html.erb
app/views/help/officers.html.erb
app/views/help/privacy.html.erb
app/views/help/requesting.html.erb
app/views/help/unhappy.html.erb
app/views/info_request_batch/_batch_sent.html.erb
app/views/layouts/default.html.erb
app/views/outgoing_mailer/initial_request.text.erb
app/views/public_body/_body_listing_single.html.erb
app/views/public_body/list.html.erb
app/views/public_body/show.html.erb
app/views/public_body/statistics.html.erb
app/views/public_body/view_email.html.erb
app/views/public_body_change_requests/new.html.erb
app/views/request/_act.html.erb
app/views/request/_after_actions.html.erb
app/views/request/_followup.html.erb
app/views/request/_hidden_correspondence.html.erb
app/views/request/_request_search_form.html.erb
app/views/request/_request_sent.html.erb
app/views/request/_restricted_correspondence.html.erb
app/views/request/_search_ahead.html.erb
app/views/request/_sidebar.html.erb
app/views/request/followup_bad.html.erb
app/views/request/followup_preview.html.erb
app/views/request/list.html.erb
app/views/request/new.html.erb
app/views/request/new_bad_contact.html.erb
app/views/request/preview.html.erb
app/views/request/select_authorities.html.erb
app/views/request/select_authority.html.erb
app/views/request/show.html.erb
app/views/request/show_response.html.erb
app/views/request_game/play.html.erb
app/views/request_mailer/comment_on_alert.text.erb
app/views/request_mailer/comment_on_alert_plural.text.erb
app/views/request_mailer/new_response.text.erb
app/views/request_mailer/not_clarified_alert.text.erb
app/views/request_mailer/old_unclassified_updated.text.erb
app/views/request_mailer/overdue_alert.text.erb
app/views/request_mailer/requires_admin.text.erb
app/views/request_mailer/stopped_responses.text.erb
app/views/request_mailer/very_overdue_alert.text.erb
app/views/track/_tracking_links.html.erb
app/views/user/_show_user_info.html.erb
app/views/user/_signin.html.erb
app/views/user/_signup.html.erb
app/views/user/set_crop_profile_photo.html.erb
app/views/user/set_draft_profile_photo.html.erb
app/views/user/show.html.erb
app/views/user/sign.html.erb
app/views/user/signchangeemail.html.erb
app/views/user/signchangepassword.html.erb
app/views/user/signchangepassword_send_confirm.html.erb
app/views/user/signin_successful.html.erb
app/views/user/wall.html.erb
app/views/user/wrong_user.html.erb
app/views/user/wrong_user_unknown_email.html.erb
app/views/widgets/new.html.erb
- Set the return-path for the contact form mail (Louise Crow).
- There should be no action necessary.
- Added additional transaction stats to /version.json endpoint (Gareth Rees).
- Added additional transaction stats to stats:show rake task (Gareth Rees).
- There should be no action necessary.
- Adds filtering of incoming mail based on a spam score from SpamAssassin. Requests over a threshold can be discarded or sent to the holding pen. See http://alaveteli.org/docs/customising/config#incoming_email_spam_action for configuration instructions (Gareth Rees).
- There should be no action necessary.
- The source code now uses two-space indentation (Gareth Rees).
- A
FACEBOOK_USERNAMEconfiguration option is now available (Gareth Rees). - The
jsonAPI for public bodies now includes statistics on the number of requests, number of visible successful classified requests, and number of successful, overdue, not held requests (Ross Jones).
- There should be no action necessary.
- Most templates have changed to two-space indentation. For ease of future upgrades you should update your overrides to match.
- Upgrades and fixes for security announcements CVE-2015-3225, CVE-2015-3227 and CVE-2015-1840 (Louise Crow).
- Attachment text conversion to UTF-8 is now handled in a clearer way by the
FoiAttachmentmodel. Censor rules are applied with the appropriate encoding (Louise Crow). - A rake task
temp:fix_invalid_utf8has been added to help people migrating an Alaveteli install from ruby 1.8.7 to a later ruby version (Louise Crow). - An example wrapper script,
config/run-with-rbenv-pathhas been added to run the mail scripts using the ruby version set byrbenv. Example code for this has also been added to the daemon and cron example files. - Remove dependency on tools provided by sharutils package (Gareth Rees).
- Use rack-utf8_sanitizer to handle badly-formed UTF-8 in request URI and headers (Louise Crow).
- Correctly handle names with commas in ContactMailer (Louise Crow).
- Various performance improvements in InfoRequestEvent (Gareth Rees).
- Improve performance of PublicBodyController#show (Gareth Rees).
- Various performance improvements in PublicBody (Gareth Rees).
- General improvements to string encoding handling (Louise Crow).
- Allow locale specific language names (Louise Crow).
- Fix count of requests on authority page (Henare Degan).
- Added Croatian Alaveteli to the list of world FOI websites (Miroslav Schlossberg).
- Various code duplication cleanup (James McKinney).
- Improve error reporting on graph generation (Petter Reinholdtsen).
- Admin summary page performance improvements (Gareth Rees).
- Various performance improvements in InfoRequest (Gareth Rees).
- Add missing ttf-bitstream-vera package (Petter Reinholdtsen).
- Send mail import errors to exception notification address (Louise Crow).
- Add bullet for tracking N+1 queries in development environment. Turn on by
setting
USE_BULLET_IN_DEVELOPMENTtotrue(Gareth Rees). - Performance improvement when initializing InfoRequest instances (Gareth Rees).
- root no longer required to read mail logs
- Code quality improvements to ActsAsXapian (Louise Crow).
- Don't put HTML entities in email subject lines (Henare Degan).
- Defunct authorities are removed from the list of authorities with mising emails on the admin summary page (Henare Degan).
- Correctly encode words to highlight (Caleb Tutty).
- The request email of a PublicBody with a blank request_email database
attribute will not be overridden by
OVERRIDE_ALL_PUBLIC_BODY_REQUEST_EMAILS(Henare Degan). - Fixed a bug in the HealthChecksHelper when applying 'OK' style (Caleb Tutty).
- Keep cookies from txt files in suggested Varnish configuration (Henare Degan).
- Improvements to the Categorisation Game charts (Henare Degan).
- Destroing an InfoRequest now destroys associated Comments and CensorRules (Louise Crow).
- There is experimental support for using an STMP server, rather than sendmail, for outgoing mail. There is not yet any ability to retry if the SMTP server is unavailable (Caleb Tutty, Louise Crow).
- HTML 'widgets' advertising requests can be displayed on other sites in iframes.
If
ENABLE_WIDGETSis set to true ingeneral.yml(the default is false), a link to the widget code will appear in the right hand sidebar of a request page. (Jody McIntyre, Louise Crow). - Capistrano now caches themes (Henare Degan).
- Improve correspondence box padding (Luke Bacon).
- Improve empty PublicBody translation rejection (Henare Degan).
- New message attachment icons (Martin Wright).
- Improve localisation (Louise Crow, Petter Reinholdtsen, Gorm Eriksen).
- Update xapian-full-alaveteli for Ruby 2.1 compatibility (Louise Crow).
- Improve header search form (Luke Bacon).
- Fix 'link to this' button on touch devices (Luke Bacon).
-
Version 0.22 is the last release to support Ruby 1.8.7.
We have an evolving upgrade guide on the wiki, and we're always available on the alaveteli-dev mailing list.
-
Ruby version files are ignored – these are delegated to people's development or deployment environments. See https://goo.gl/01MCCi and e5180fa89.
-
Ensure all overridden Ruby source files have encoding specifier. See 576b58803.
-
Memcached namespace is now dependent on Ruby version. No action required.
-
Capistrano now caches themes in
shared/themes. Run thedeploy:setuptask to create the shared directory before making a new code deploy. -
Example daemon files have been renamed (7af5e9d). You'll need to use the new names in any scripts or documentation you've written.
-
Regenerate alert tracks and purge varnish daemons to get better stop daemon handling.
-
Regenerate Varnish config so that cookies from txt files are not ignored. See db2db066.
-
Regenerate the crontab so that root is no longer used to read mail logs.
-
Give the unix application user membership of the adm group so that they can read the mail log files
usermod -a -G adm "$UNIX_USER" -
Remove summary stats from admin summary page. They're duplicated on /admin/summary. No action required.
-
The default branch has been changed from
rails-3-developtodevelop. Use ofrails-3-developwill stop, and the branch will be removed at some point. -
Add the ttf-bitstream-vera package to provide Vera.ttf to the cron jobs.
-
Alaveteli no longer requires the sharutils package.
-
Remember to
rake db:migrateandgit submodule update -
If you handle attachment text in your theme, note that:
FoiAttachment#bodywill always return a binary encoded stringFoiAttachment#body_as_textwill always return a UTF-8 encoded stringFoiAttachment#default_bodywill return a UTF-8 encoded string for text content types, and a binary encoded string for all other types.
The following templates have been changed. Please update overrides in your theme to match the new templates.
app/views/admin_general/index.html.erb
app/views/admin_public_body/edit.html.erb
app/views/comment/_comment_form.html.erb
app/views/comment/_single_comment.html.erb
app/views/general/_responsive_topnav.html.erb
app/views/help/unhappy.html.erb
app/views/public_body/show.html.erb
app/views/public_body_change_requests/new.html.erb
app/views/request/_act.html.erb
app/views/request/_followup.html.erb
app/views/request/_incoming_correspondence.html.erb
app/views/request/_outgoing_correspondence.html.erb
app/views/request/_request_listing_via_event.html.erb
app/views/request/_request_search_form.html.erb
app/views/request/_resent_outgoing_correspondence.html.erb
app/views/request/new.html.erb
app/views/request/new_bad_contact.html.erb
app/views/request/show.html.erb
app/views/request_game/play.html.erb
app/views/track/_tracking_links.html.erb
app/views/user/_user_listing_single.html.erb
app/views/user/show.html.erb
- Lots of improvements in the process of making a new
request (Martin Wright, Gareth Rees, Louise Crow):
- Removal of confusing AJAX results in
/select_authority. - Better layout of search/filtering options on the authority pages.
- Better layout of the authority pages on smaller screens.
- The dynamic list of possibly related requests for a new request is now limited to requests to the same authority and capped at three requests
- 'Create a new account' option now more prominent than 'Sign in' on
/sign_in - Better options for sharing your request on social media, and other actions to take once the request is made.
- Removal of confusing AJAX results in
- Some general security improvements:
- State changing admin actions are now restricted to PUT or POST methods to protect against CSRF attacks, and now use more standard RESTful routing (Louise Crow).
- Global request forgery protection is now used (Gareth Rees).
- Some standard security headers are added by default (Louise Crow).
- A TTL is enforced on session cookies (Louise Crow).
- Added a new
AUTHORITY_MUST_RESPONDconfiguration variable. Set this totrueIf authorities must respond by law. Set tofalseotherwise. It defaults totrue. At the moment this just tweaks some UI text (Gareth Rees). - New rake task for cleaning theme translations -
rake gettext:clean_theme(Gareth Rees). - There's a new admin interface for adding public holidays for the site, to be used in calculating request due dates. Documentation for using this interface is available at http://alaveteli.org/docs/installing/next_steps/#add-some-public-holidays (Louise Crow).
- Some interface phrases have been grouped together for easier translation (Gareth Rees, Louise Crow).
- Now using the bootstrap js files from the bootstrap-sass gem.
- Confusing 'web analytics' section of admin pages removed (Henare Degan)
- Banned users can no longer update their profile (Gareth Rees).
- The code that removes email addresses and mobile phone numbers from the public view of requests an responses has been refactored, and the text that's used to replace the email addresses and phone numbers can now be translated (Louise Crow).
- Fixed a bug with the CSV import of authorities which have the same name in multiple locales (Louise Crow).
- No longer need to restart webserver when compacting Xapian database (Gareth Rees).
config/deploy.ymlnow accepts adaemon_nameparameter so that Capistrano can deploy multiple Alaveteli instances on the same host (Gareth Rees).
- Admin route names have been standardised so if you have overridden
templates that refer to admin routes, check the original templates to
see if these need to be changed. URLs in rreviously sent admin emails about
requested changes to authorities will need to be tweaked to work - from
admin/body/new?change_request_id=ntoadmin/bodies/new?change_request_id=n - CSRF protection is now used by default on forms using 'POST', and as a result, the navbar and front page
search forms have been converted to use 'GET' rather than 'POST'. If you override
/app/views/general/_frontpage_search_box.html.erb,app/views/general/header.html.erborapp/views/general/_responsive_topnav.html.erb, you should update the search forms in your templates to use 'GET'. Any forms of your own that use the 'POST' method should be generated in Rails or otherwise include a CSRF token. If they don't, logged-in users will be logged out when they use them. - If you override the
app/views/user/_signin.html.erborapp/view/user/_signup.html.erbtemplates, check the tabindex order is still sensible - the order of the elements on the page has changed- signup now appears on the left.
- If you override the application stylesheets rather than adding to them
using a
custom.cssorcustom.scssfile, check that your stylesheets still order elements correctly in the templatesapp/views/request/select_authority.html.erb,app/views/public_body/show.html.erbandapp/views/request/new.html.erb. Also, if you use the application stylesheets, but have overridden any of these templates or their partials, check to see if you need to update the order of elements in the templates. - Regenerate your crontab so that compacting the Xapian database only restarts the application, rather than the webserver. This requires the appropriate SysVinit script to be installed.
- Alaveteli daemons must be executable by the app owner in a Capistrano setup.
In a regular setup, the permissions should be
rwxr-xr-- root:alaveteli. config/sysvinit-thin.uglyhas been improved. Regenerate it withrake config_files:convert_init_script. See the documentation for more information.- This release includes an update to the commonlib submodule - you should be warned about this when running rails-post-deploy.
- Upgrade compass-rails to version 2.0.0 (Louise Crow, Вальо)
- Added a fix to ensure attachments are rendered for emails sent with Apple Mail (Gareth Rees)
- Removed the authority preview from
/select_authority. Clicking an authority now goes straight to the authority page (Gareth Rees) - Allow closure of a change request without sending an email (Louise Crow)
- The sidebar in
app/views/public_body/show.html.erbhas been extracted toapp/views/public_body/_more_info.html.erbto make overriding it in a theme easier (Gareth Rees) - Allow resetting of the locale pattern on the locale routing filter (Louise Crow)
- Added filtering to the requests displayed on the user profile page (Gareth Rees)
- Add a Health Check page (Gareth Rees)
- Add a user interface for managing Public Body Categories (Liz Conlan, Louise Crow)
- Improve
CensorRulevalidations. Please see Upgrade Notes if you have added or modified aCensorRulein your theme (Gareth Rees) - Stop the
/blogpage throwing an exception if a correctly configured blog has no posts (Gareth Rees) - Fixed a CSS issue with the authority preview container (Louise Crow)
- Sensible default values have been added to some configuration parameters. See upgrade notes for additional instruction (Gareth Rees)
general.yml-examplenow contains full documentation and examples (Gareth Rees)- CSV Import fields (for
/admin/body/import_csv) are now configurable. This is useful if your theme adds additional attributes toPublicBody(Steven Day)
For example:
# YOUR_THEME/lib/model_patches.rb
# Extra fields can be appended to `csv_import_fields` in the format:
# ['ATTRIBUTE_NAME', 'HELP_TEXT_DISPLAYED_IN_ADMIN_UI']
#
PublicBody.csv_import_fields << ['twitter_username', 'Do not include the @']
- Public body categories will now be stored in the database rather than being read directly from the
lib/public_body_categories_LOCALEfiles. Once you have upgraded, runscript/migrate-public-body-categoriesto import the contents of the files into the database. All further changes will then need to be made via the administrative interface. You can then remove anypubic_body_categories_[locale].rbfiles from your theme. If your theme has any calls toPublicBodyCategoriesmethods outside these files, you should update them to call the corresponding method onPublicBodyCategoryinstead. OutgoingMessage#send_messagehas been removed. We now perform email deliveries outside of the model layer in three steps:
Example:
# Check the message is sendable
if @outgoing_message.sendable?
# Deliver the email
mail_message = OutgoingMailer.initial_request(
@outgoing_message.info_request,
@outgoing_message
).deliver
# Record the email delivery
@outgoing_message.record_email_delivery(
mail_message.to_addrs.join(', '),
mail_message.message_id
)
end
See #1889 for the full changes and feel free to ask on the developer mailing list if this change causes a problem.
-
MTA_LOG_PATHnow has a default value of'/var/log/exim4/exim-mainlog-*'. Check that yourMTA_LOG_PATHsetting is configured to the path where your mail logs are stored. -
MAX_REQUESTS_PER_USER_PER_DAYnow has a default value of6. If you do not have a value set inconfig/general.ymlyou will need to set it to match your existing configuration. If you do not aMAX_REQUESTS_PER_USER_PER_DAYlimit, set the value to an empty string (''). -
INCOMING_EMAIL_PREFIXnow has a default of'foi+'. If you do not have a value set inconfig/general.ymlyou will need to set it to match your existing configuration. If you do not want anINCOMING_EMAIL_PREFIX, set the value to an empty string ('', the previous default). -
An
adminprefix has been added to the:spam_addressesresources. If you have used one of these paths in your theme, prefix the named route helper withadmin_. -
CensorRulenow validates the presence of all attributes at the model layer, rather than only as a database constraint. If you have added aCensorRulein your theme, you will now have to satisfy the additional validations on the:replacement,:last_edit_commentand:last_edit_editorattributes. -
CensorRule#require_user_request_or_public_body,CensorRule#make_regexpandCensorRule#require_valid_regexphave become private methods. If you override them in your theme, ensure they are preceded by theprivatekeyword.
- Improved documentation at http://alaveteli.org/docs (Louise Crow, Gareth Rees, Dave Whiteland)
- Added mySociety Launchpad PPA to supply updated version of pdftk (Louise Crow)
- Made default maintenance page generic (Gareth Rees)
- Support additional Vagrant operating system images (Gareth Rees)
- Add SysVinit for Phusion Passenger (Gareth Rees)
- Eager loading to speed up
body_request_eventsAPI action (Louise Crow) - Ability to update the status of external requests made via the API (Liz Conlan)
- Removed more mySociety internal dependencies from install script and example configuration and template files (Gareth Rees)
- Improved example configuration files (Gareth Rees)
- Support Portugese locale (Louise Crow)
- Default to using UTF-8 encoded database for new installs and CI (Gareth Rees)
- Better config file generators in
lib/tasks/config_files.rake(Gareth Rees) - Improved search term highlighting (Gareth Rees)
- Added responsive styling (Louise Crow)
- Documentation tidying and redirection (Louise Crow)
- Allow a message with more than one event to be destroyed (Louise Crow)
- Makes public body stats available if configured (Gareth Rees)
- Cache-busting on request response notification emails (Gareth Rees)
- Better error handling on new requests (Louise Crow)
- Rake task for cleaning up holding pen events (
rake cleanup:holding_pen) (Louise Crow) - Added searching of bodies by short_name (Gareth Rees)
- Additional stats on
/version.json(Gareth Rees) - Minor tweaks to the homepage (Gareth Rees)
- Translation housekeeping (Louise Crow)
- Minor style updates to admin request edit page (Gareth Rees)
HighlightHelper#excerptbackports the Rails 4excerptwhich requires a Hash for the options parameter rather than globbing the remaining arguments.
For example:
- <%=h excerpt(info_request.initial_request_text, "", 100) %>
+ <%=h excerpt(info_request.initial_request_text, "", :radius => 100) %>
You will need to update any use of excerpt in your theme to use the Hash args.
- Ubuntu Precise users can get an updated version of pdftk from mySociety's PPA
Install the repo and update the sources:
apt-get install python-software-properties
add-apt-repository ppa:mysociety/alaveteli
apt-get update
The mySociety pdftk package (1.44-7~precise1ms1) should now be the install
candidate:
apt-cache policy pdftk
-
Install
lockfile-progsso that therun-with-lockfileshell script can be used instead of the C program -
Use responsive stylesheets in
config/general.yml:RESPONSIVE_STYLING: true. If you don't currently use responsive styling, and you don't want to get switched over just setRESPONSIVE_STYLING: falseand the fixed-width stylesheets will be used as before. -
Allow access to public body stats page if desired in
config/general/yml:PUBLIC_BODY_STATISTICS_PAGE: true -
Run migrations to define track_things constraint correctly (Robin Houston) and add additional index for
event_typeoninfo_request_events(Steven Day) -
The
SHARED_DIRECTORIESsetting now includestmp/pids. The notes below for updating the log directory should cover the update steps fortmp/pids. -
Capistrano now creates
SHARED_PATH/tmp/pidsand linksAPP_ROOT/tmp/pidshere, as the alert tracks daemon writes its pids to the generally expected location ofAPP_ROOT/tmp/pids. -
rails-post-deploy no longer handles linking
APP_ROOT/logto a log directory outside the app. Capistrano users will find that:symlink_configurationnow linksAPP_ROOT/logtoSHARED_PATH/log. Users who aleady use theSHARED_FILESandSHARED_DIRECTORIESsettings inconfig/general.ymlshould addlog/to theSHARED_DIRECTORIESsetting. The existing mechanism for shared directories (inscript/rails-deploy-before-down) will create the necessary link toSHARED_FILES_PATH/log. If your existing shared log directory is not atSHARED_FILES_PATH/log, move the directory and re-runscript/rails-post-deployto link up the new location. If you don't useSHARED_FILESandSHARED_DIRECTORIES, alaveteli will now write it's application logs toAPP_ROOT/lograther thanAPP_ROOT/../logsby default. -
public_body_change_requests/new.html.erbhas a new field for spam prevention so customisations of this template should be updated with:<%= label_tag 'public_body_change_request[comment]', _('Do not fill in this field') %> <%= text_field_tag 'public_body_change_request[comment]' %>
This is the anti-spam honeypot. -
The workaround for an old bug in libc6 in squeeze has been removed. If you're running on squeeze, please make sure you're using the latest version of libc6 (2.11.3-4) to prevent the risk of segfaults.
-
The capistrano
stop,startandrestarttasks now restart the app server via the service/etc/init.d/alaveteli. If you're using capistrano for deployment, make sure/etc/init.d/alaveteliexists and is current, and executable by the cap user. You can create it using the templateconfig/sysvinit-thin.uglyorconfig/sysvinit-passenger.uglyas described in http://alaveteli.org/docs/installing/manual_install/#generate-alaveteli-service -
This release includes an update to the commonlib submodule - you should be warned about this when running rails-post-deploy.
- There is an alternative set of stylesheets and header and footer templates for rendering the site in a stripped-down, responsive way (so that it will display appropriately on mobile devices as well as larger screens). This can be customised in a theme. We'll be adding some corresponding stylesheets shortly to alavetelitheme to provide a nice basic look and feel that can be customised. Eventually these responsive stylesheets will become the default (Louise Crow).
- Improvements in the Vagrant file (update to v2 API, configuration of FQDN, VirtualBox memory, development environment, better documentation) (Gareth Rees)
- Full date/time of correspondence now displayed on hover (Gareth Rees)
- Admins can now hide annotations in bulk from the admin interface (Andrew Black)
- Admins can now mark non-request email addresses as spam-targets if they are only receiving spam, so that email sent to these addresses no longer shows up in the holding pen, but is silently discarded (Gareth Rees)
- The contact form now has an anti-spam honeypot, and prevents double submission (Gareth Rees)
- Improvements to some translatable strings so that they're not composed on the fly according to English grammar (Louise Crow)
- Fixed bugs in text conversion under Ruby 1.9 (Rowan Crawford), handling of messages directing people to other instances of Alaveteli (Louise Crow), link-to-this popup location, 404 handling, comments on requests that are closed to comments, missing title tags in HTML attachments, PDF conversion and public body batch updates (Gareth Rees).
-
To use the responsive stylesheets across the site, add
RESPONSIVE_STYLING: trueto general.yml. To preview the way a given page would appear with the new stylesheets, add the parameterresponsive=1to the URL. -
Theme owners are required to update references to fancybox CSS and JS files. Example:
- <%= javascript_include_tag 'jquery.fancybox-1.3.4.pack.js' %>
- <%= javascript_include_tag 'fancybox.js' %>
- <%= stylesheet_link_tag 'jquery.fancybox-1.3.4.css', :rel => "stylesheet"
- <%= stylesheet_link_tag 'fancybox.css', :rel => "stylesheet" %>
-
There are some new strings in this release for translation, so if your site isn't in English, make sure your translations are up to date before deploying to production
-
If your theme overrides the help/contact template, you should add elements to the form to match those added to the main template:
<%= f.label :comment, 'Do not fill in this field' %> <%= f.text_field :comment %>
This is the anti-spam honeypot.
- There is some initial support for making a request to multiple authorities at once.
- There is a new form for users to request that a new authority should be added, or to request an update to the contact email used for an authority. Site admins are emailed about these requests, and can resolve them from the admin interface.
- For attachments where we rely on Google Document Viewer to display the HTML version, link to the HTTPS version where the Alaveteli site is served over HTTPS to avoid mixed content warnings and non display in some browsers (Matthew Somerville).
- The 'view requests' page now has some fragment caching backed by
memcached to speed up serving commonly used lists of requests - e.g
all successful requests. Like the caching introduced in release 0.16,
this is controlled by the
CACHE_FRAGMENTSparameter in the config file and will be on by default. - A user's annotations can now be seen on their admin page (Andrew Black)
- Better detection of the quoted text of a previous email in the HTML parts of responses.
- Fixed bugs in the profile photos (György Peng), calendar translations (Mark Longair), the use of external utilities (Ian Chard), the internal admin authority locale handling (Mark Longair), badly formed attachment handling (Rowan Crawford).
- To use the batch request functionality, set the
ALLOW_BATCH_REQUESTSparameter totruein your config file. Once this is done, and the install has been restarted, any user for whom 'Can make batch requests' is checked in the admin interface should see a new link on the 'Select an authority' page that allows them to make a batch request. - If your theme overrides the help/requesting template, you should
update the link in the section on requesting new authorities so the
link points to
<%= new_change_request_path %>instead of<%= help_contact_path %>. - If your site runs over HTTPS, some cached attachments may still contain links to Google Document Viewer with 'http', not 'https'. You can clear the cached attachments after upgrade, and they will be created with links that use the correct protocol.
- This release includes an update to the commonlib submodule - you should be warned about this when running rails-post-deploy.
- Upgrade of the Rails framework to 3.2.16
- Enabling the Rails asset pipeline for managing assets (more about the asset pipeline at http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html).
- The all authorities csv download now uses less system resources
- Ruby 2.0 is now included in the matrix of versions we run continuous integration tests against
- When using capistrano, the RAILS_ENV can now be explicitly set from deploy.yml
- The front page and request pages once more use fragment caching backed by memcached to speed up serving of slow parts of these pages
- The robots.txt file has been updated to allow crawling of response attachment files (in original and HTML versions)
- The
themes:installrake task is kinder to developers; it no longer removes and reclones themes, destroying local changes, and it keeps themes as git repositories. - Social media elements (the blog, twitter feed) are only included if the appropriate config variables (BLOG_FEED and TWITTER_USERNAME) have been populated.
- Some fixes to the treatment of hyphenated/underscored locales so that public body translations are consistently stored using the underscore format of the locale (so 'he_IL', not 'he-IL').
- The popup message elements for temporary notices and for letting users know about other sites have been made consistent and now use simpler styles.
- You will need to update your theme to use the asset pipeline - notes on how to do this are in doc/THEME-ASSETS-UPGRADE.md
- The syntax of the highlight and excerpt methods has changed, so if you use these in your theme, you may see deprecation warnings until you update them. More information at http://apidock.com/rails/v3.2.13/ActionView/Helpers/TextHelper/highlight and http://apidock.com/rails/v3.2.13/ActionView/Helpers/TextHelper/excerpt
- If you don't want to use fragment caching, you can turn it off in your
config file by setting
CACHE_FRAGMENTStofalse. - If you use a locale with an underscore in it, you should double check
that the locale field of your
public_body_translationstable shows the underscore version of the locale name. - This release includes an update to the commonlib submodule - you should be warned about this when running rails-post-deploy
- All code has been moved out of the deprecated plugin path
vendor/plugins. Once you are up and running under 0.16, you should check that your xapian databases have all been copied tolib/acts_as_xapian/xapiandbs(the code inconfig/initializers/acts_as_xapianshould do this), and then check and remove any files under vendor/plugins so that you won't get deprecation warnings about having Rails 2.3 style plugins (deprecation warnings can result in incoming mail getting an auto reply under some email configs). - If you have any custom styles that rely on the absolute positioning of the 'banner' and 'wrapper' elements, they may need to be updated.
- Cached HTML versions of attachments in cache/attachments_production/
will have obsolete links to
/stylesheets/main.cssand/images/navimg/logo-trans-small.png. You can resolve these by either moving the cached attachments away and allowing them to be regenerated on demand, or by symlinkingpublic/stylesheets/main.csstopublic/assets/application.cssandpublic/images/navimg/logo-trans-small.pngtopublic/assets/navimg/logo-trans-small.png.
- A new install script for setting up Alaveteli automatically on
a fresh Debian wheezy or Ubuntu precise server, and a
Vagrantfile so that it can be easily invoked by
vagrant up - Salutations in outgoing messages now can contain regular expression special characters.
- The links to public bodies from the first letters of the alphabet now work properly in when the letter would be represented by multiple bytes in UTF-8.
- There are improvements to searching for public bodies and when the "ask us to add one" message is shown.
- There is a fix for the long-standing error about duplicate Xapian job creation.
- A new rake task for importing large numbers of public bodies
from CSV files:
rake import:import_csv. - Various improvements to the public body statistics graphs, thanks to feedback from the WDTK volunteers.
- The new_relic gem has been updated (Matthew Landauer)
- An example nginx config file for running Alaveteli behind
nginx:
config/nginx.conf.example. - There's now a simple script for switching between themes
(
script/switch-theme.rb) for developers who have to work on more than one jurisdiction's theme.
- There is now an option to display a public body statistics page (currently not linked to from anywhere) showing bodies with the most requests, most successful requests, fewest successful requests, most overdue requests, and bodies that reply most frequently with "Not Held" - see Upgrade notes for how to turn this option on. (Mark Longair)
- Individual incoming and outgoing messages can be made hidden, or requester_only from the admin interface.
- Zip downloads now can be run in single-threaded instances, and use send_file rather than a redirect to serve up cached zip files.
- Starting to use factory_girl to generate model instances for use in specs - hopefully in the long term removing dependencies between specs, and allowing them to run faster once we can remove the loading of fixtures each time.
- Fix to allow public body list page to use current, not default locale, with optional fallback to default issue #1000 - see Upgrade notes for fallback option (Mark Longair)
- Fix to allow request titles composed of only unicode characters issue #902
- Fix for occasional errors caused by race conditions in xapian updates issue #555
- Diagnostic errors are now not shown for local requests, so that the user-facing error pages will be shown when running Alaveteli behind a proxy in production (Henare Degan)
- By default, Alaveteli will now serve up request zip files itself, which will occupy a Rails process until the file has been received. To pass these files off to Apache, and free up the Rails process, install the libapache2-mod-xsendfile package, and update your httpd.conf file with the new Sendfile clause at the end of config/httpd.conf-example).
- In your production install, from the Alaveteli directory (as the Alaveteli deploy user), run the following commands to remove the zip download directory from direct access by your webserver, and preserve any cached zip files:
mkdir cache/zips/production/mv cache/zips/download cache/zips/production/downloadrm public/download - This release upgrades the assumed version of Ubuntu from lucid (10.04) to precise (12.04)
- This release upgrades rubygems in config/packages - version 1.8.15 is available from squeeze-backports on Debian or by default in Ubuntu precise. This upgrade may result in "invalid date format in specification:" errors - these should be fixable by manually deleting the gems specs that are being referenced in the error and re-running rails-post-deploy
- If you would like to have a public body statistics page (this will be publicly available), set the
PUBLIC_BODY_STATISTICS_PAGEparam in general.yml totrue. You should also add a new cron job based on the one in config/crontab-examplehttps://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/blob/develop/config/crontab-example#L29to update the public body stats each day. - If you would like the public body list page to include bodies that have no translation in the current locale, but do have a translation in the default locale, add a
PUBLIC_BODY_LIST_FALLBACK_TO_DEFAULT_LOCALEparam set totrueto your config/general.yml file.
- Fix for bug that resulted in some incorrect results when using search by request status issue #460. You can view and fix requests with inconsistent state history using
rake temp:fix_bad_request_states - All status updates (whether by the request owner or another user) are now logged in the event history, for better audit) (Matthew Landauer)
- Fix for bug that dropped accented characters from URLs issue #282 (zejn)
- A fix for a bug that produced binary mask errors when handling multibyte characters in responses issue #991
- Some locale fixes for locales with a dash in them issue #998 and issue #999.
- Some improvements in the labelling of defunct authorities (Matthew Somerville)
- The addition of a check on the status of the commonlib submodule to the rails-post-deploy script.
- Check out this version and run
rails-post-deployas usual. - This release includes an update to the commonlib submodule - you should now be warned about this on running
rails-post-deploy. You can update to the new version withgit submodule update. - After deploying, run
rake temp:fix_bad_request_statesto find and list requests that have an inconsistent history - runrake temp:fix_bad_request_states DRYRUN=0to fix them.
- Remove support for theme stylesheet inclusion via template (deprecated in version 0.5)
- Addition of a simple JSON API for querying the Ruby and Alaveteli version of an Alaveteli instance - made available at /version.json (Matthew Landauer)
- Users can now give more information when reporting a request as unsuitable (Matthew Landauer)
- The donation url presented to users when they report their request as successful or partially successful is now option and the url itself can be configured using the config param DONATION_URL
- Internal review request text is now translatable
- config/crontab.ugly is now config/crontab-example
- Search query highlighting should now work with non-ascii characters issue #505 (Matthew Landauer)
- A bug that allowed people to sign up with email addresses with spaces in them has been fixed issue #980. Any existing email addresses with spaces in them will cause problems e.g. when the cron scripts encounter them. You can fix them manually, or by running
rake temp:clean_up_emails_with_spacesfromlib/tasks/temp.rake - List of issues on github
- Check out this version and run
rails-post-deployas usual. - Add a DONATION_URL to your config/general.yml file if you want to use your own donation URL.
- Upgrade of the Rails framework to version 3.1.12 (Henare Degan, Matthew Landauer, Mark Longair, Louise Crow)
- Manually remove vendor/rails-locales
- Themes created for 0.9 and below should be updated to work with Rails 3. See
THEMES-UPGRADE.mdfor notes on upgrading your theme. You will need to manually remove your old theme directory before runningrails-post-deploy. - The
config/httpd.confhas moved toconfig/httpd.conf-example, as it may need customization before deploying. It also has a new line setting RackEnv to production - copy this to your config/httpd.conf file. - Alaveteli now uses the mail gem rather than tmail to handle mail. If you're using Exim as your MTA, you'll need to use the setting
extract_addresses_remove_arguments = falsein your Exim conf (see INSTALL-exim4.md for details). This means it won't remove addresses specified with -t on command line from the mail recipient list.
- Consistent and more informative variable interpolation syntax in translated phrases. All of these phrases will now appear in the form "There are {{count}} people following this request", where some were previously in the form "There are %s people following this request". (Matthew Landauer)
- Replaces deprecated calls to with_locale on ActiveRecord classes in preparation for upgrade to Globalize3 (Matthew Landauer)
- Fixes a database deadlock bug caused by near-simultaneous incoming emails for the same info request (Mark Longair)
- Check out this version and run
rails-post-deployas usual.
- Support for running the site over SSL/TLS only and corresponding removal of support for a proxied admin interface, including the deprecation of the main_url and admin_url helpers.
- Merging of the adminbootstrap theme into core Alaveteli, replacing the existing admin theme. (Matthew Landauer)
- Move to HTML 5 (Matthew Landauer)
- More consistent UI for links in the admin interface
- [Security] Upgrades the Rails version to 2.3.17 to get fixes for CVE-2013-0277, CVE-2013-0276 (Although core Alaveteli does not use serialize or attr_protected), upgrade JSON gem to get fix for CVE-2013-0269.
- A bugfix for Chrome's autofilling of signup fields (Vaughan Rouesnel)
- Improvements to the accessibility of the search boxes (Nathan Jenkins)
- Only one email sent when asking for admin attention to a request issue #789 (Matthew Landauer)
- A number of XSS escaping fixes for Version 0.7 (Matthew Landauer)
- The emergency admin account can now be disabled
- Check out this version and run
rails-post-deployas usual. - Remove adminbootstrap from the THEME_URLS or THEME_URL config variable, and remove vendor/plugins/adminbootstraptheme, and the softlink public/adminbootstraptheme.
- There is a new config variable FORCE_SSL, which defaults to true, meaning that Alaveteli will redirect all "http" requests to "https", set the Strict-Transport-Security header and flag all cookies as "secure". For more information about running your install over SSL/TLS, see the install guide. If you don't want to run over SSL/TLS, add the config variable FORCE_SSL to your config/general.yml and set it to false.
- If you would like to disable the emergency user account, set DISABLE_EMERGENCY_USER to true in you config/general.yml
- [Security] Upgrades the Rails version from 2.3.15 to 2.3.16 to get fix for a critical security flaw in Rails (CVE-2013-0333).
- Adds rails_xss gem to make HTML escaping the default behaviour in views.
- Allows cap rake:themes:install to be run standalone and in the context of a deploy.
- Gem bundle is always installed in the vendor directory, even in development mode.
- Interlock plugin removed.
- Models have named validation methods, and don't overwrite validate anymore.
- Check out this version and run
rails-post-deployas usual. - Check your themes for any strings that are now being escaped but shouldn't be and either use raw or .html_safe to resolve them. Don't do this with strings from user input!
-
[Security] Fix for security issue where image files from HTML conversion on hidden/requester-only requests were accessible without authentication issue #739.
-
[Security] Fix for issue where the zip file download function was available for logged-in users even on hidden/requester-only requests issue #743
-
[Security] Upgrades to Rails 2.3.15 to get fixes for Rails security flaws CVE-2012-5664 and CVE-2013-0156. In addition, switches to use Rails pulled from a clone in the mySociety github account, which has had the CVE-2013-0155 2.3 series patch applied to it.
-
Isolation of mail handling code in the MailHandler module in lib/mail_handler
-
Tests run under Ruby 1.9.3 - running the app under 1.9 not yet advised.
-
Routes without a locale part can be enabled for the default locale - see upgrade notes
-
Fixes to support themed error pages, and allow responsive themes (Matthew Landauer, Brendan Molloy)
-
Migrations run under sqlite (Stefan Langenmaier)
-
Time zone fixes (Henare Degan)
-
Faster tests (Henare Degan)
- Note the new config variable INCLUDE_DEFAULT_LOCALE_IN_URLS (if not set defaults to true, which should replicate existing behaviour)
- Check out this version and run
rails-post-deployas usual.
-
Support for using Postfix as Alaveteli's MTA, instead of Exim (Matthew Landauer)
-
Some preparation for getting Alaveteli working with Ruby 1.9 (James McKinney) - more to come here in future releases!
-
Optional support for using New Relic for performance monitoring (Matthew Landauer)
-
Support for showing all dates and times in the local time zone (Matthew Landauer)
-
Display of authority disclosure logs where the URL is added (Matthew Landauer)
-
Better handling of nil/empty option config parameters (Henare Degan)
-
The option to specify a particular theme branch to use (Matthew Landauer)
-
Some performance improvements, particularly over 0.6.7 (Louise Crow)
- Ensure you have values for new config variables (see
config/general.yml-example):- TIME_ZONE (if not set, defaults to UTC)
- TWITTER_WIDGET_ID (no Twitter widget is displayed if not set)
- THEME_BRANCH (defaults to tagged version specific to your version of alaveteli or, failing that, to master)
- MTA_LOG_PATH
- MTA_LOG_TYPE (defaults to Exim)
- IMPORTANT - Copy config/newrelic.yml-example to config/newrelic.yml - by default monitoring is switched off, see https://github.com/newrelic/rpm for instructions on switching on local and remote performance analysis.
- Check out this version and run
rails-post-deployas usual. - Note that mailcatcher is now used in development - see http://mailcatcher.me/ for details
-
The ability to calculate due dates using calendar, not working days (Matthew Landauer)
-
A refactor and standardization of the configuation variables and defaults using a central module (Matthew Landauer)
-
The use of full URLs in admin attention emails, and associated modification of the admin_url helper to always return full urls (Henare Degan)
-
The ability to disable comments on a request (Robin Houston)
-
Some previously missed strings for translation, courtesy of the Czech translation team
- Themes created for 0.6.6 and below should be updated to use the new Configuration module wherever they used Config.get directly previously.
- Check out this version and run
rails-post-deployas usual.
-
Adds deployment via Capistrano - see DEPLOY.md for details
-
Speeds up several admin pages that were slow in large installs
- Check out this version and run
rails-post-deployas usual. - Run
rake temp:populate_request_classificationsto populate the new request_classifications table which is used in generating the request categorisation game league tables and progress widget.
-
This is a minor release, to update all documentation and example files to reflect the move of the official repository to http://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli and the alavetelitheme and adminbootstraptheme themes to http://github.com/mysociety/alavetelitheme and http://github.com/mysociety/adminbootstraptheme respectively.
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Some basic versioning has been added for themes. An ALAVETELI_VERSION constant has been added in config/environment.rb. When loading themes,
rails-post-deploynow looks for a tag on the theme repository in the form 'use-with-alaveteli-0.6.5' that matches the ALAVETELI_VERSION being deployed - if it finds such a tag, the theme will be checked out from that tag, rather than from the HEAD of the theme repository. If no such tag is found, HEAD is used, as before issue #573. -
Apache has been configured to serve cached HTML versions of attached files (and associated images) directly from the file cache, as well as the original versions issue #580.
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PublicBodyCategories have a couple of new methods for more easily working with headings issue #575.
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Please update your
THEME_URLSto point to http://github.com/mysociety/alavetelitheme and http://github.com/mysociety/adminbootstraptheme if you are using the alavetelitheme or adminbootstraptheme themes. -
Check out this version and run
rails-post-deployas usual.
- This is a minor bugfix release, mainly to fix bugs related to external request handling.
- List of issues on github
- List of commits since last release
- No special action required -- just check out this version and run
rails-post-deployas usual.
- This is a minor release, mainly to publish new customisation features required by the upcoming Czech Republic theme
- Administrators can now use regular expressions when making Censor Rules
- It is also now possible to create "global" Censor Rules that apply to all content types in the site; however, this power is not exposed to UI users.
- Some new i18n fixes and template refactoring to allow more extensive customisation in themes
- Themes can now provide a
post_install.rbscript that is executed byrails-post-deploy - List of issues on github
- No special action required -- just check out this version and run
rails-post-deployas usual.
- This is a minor release to fix small bugs in documentation and install/upgrade process
- It also includes support for Continuous Integration using Travis
- No special action required -- just check out this version and run
rails-post-deployas usual.
- Fixes important security bug issue #515
- Show admin nav bar when browsing main site
- A new API for adding requests and correspondence to an Alaveteli instance, designed for use by public bodies that wish to use Alaveteli as a disclosure log. See the wiki for some documentation.
- Full list of changes on github
- No special action required -- just check out this version and run
rails-post-deployas usual.
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Ruby dependencies are now handled by Bundler
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Support for invalidating accelerator cache -- this makes it much less likely, when using Varnish, that users will be presented with stale content. Fixes
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Adding a
GA_CODEtogeneral.ymlwill cause the relevant Google Analytics code to be added to your rendered pages -
It is now possible to have more than one theme installed. The behaviour of multiple themes is now layered in the reverse order they're listed in the config file. See the variable
THEME_URLSingeneral.yml-examplefor an example. -
A new, experimental theme for the administrative interface. It's currently packaged as a standalone theme, but will be merged into the core once it's been tested and iterated in production a few times. Thanks to @wombleton for kicking this off!
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Alert subscriptions are now referred to as "following" a request (or group of requests) throughout the UI. When a user "follows" a request, updates regarding that request are posted on a new "wall" page. Now they have a wall, users can opt not to receive alerts by email.
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New features to support fast post-moderation of bad requests: a button for users to report potentially unsuitable requests, and a form control in the administrative interface that hides a request and sends the user an email explaining why.
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A bug which prevented locales containing underscores (e.g.
en_GB) was fixed (issue #503) -
Error pages are now presented with styling from themes
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As a result of using bundler, the list of software packages that should be installed has changed. On Debian, you can run:
sudo apt-get install `cut -d " " -f 1 config/packages | grep -v "^#"`This gist shows the changes to
config/packagessince the previous release. -
Existing installations will need to install Bundler. On Debian this is done by the above command. See
INSTALL.mdfor details. -
Because dependencies are now handled by Bundler, when you next run the
rails-post-deployscript, it will download, compile and install various things. Part of this is compiling xapian, which will take a long time (subsequent deployments will be much faster) -
To support invalidating the Varnish cache, ensure that there's a value for
VARNISH_HOSTingeneral.yml(normally this would belocalhost). You will also need to update your Varnish server to support PURGE requests. The example configuration provided atconfig/varnish-alaveteli.vclwill work for Varnish 3 and above. If you leaveVARNISH_HOSTblank, it will have no effect. Finally, you should install thepurge-varnishinit script that's provided inuglyformat atconfig/purge-varnish-debian.uglyto ensure the purge queue is emptied regularly. Once deployed, you should also check your production log for lines startingPURGE:to ensure the purges are successful (a failure will typically be due to a misconfigured Varnish). If purges are unsuccessful, the conseqence is that individual request pages that are served to anonymous users will be up to 24 hours out of date. -
Administrators are now assumed to log in using standard user accounts with superuser privileges (see 'Administrator Privileges' in
INSTALL.md). The old-style admin account (using credentials fromgeneral.yml) is now known as the "emergency user". Deployments that previously bypassed admin authentication should set the newSKIP_ADMIN_AUTHconfig variable totrue. -
If you want to try out the new administrator theme, copy the sample
THEME_URLSconfig fromgeneral.yml-exampleand run./script/rails-post-deploy. If you don't like it, turn it off again by removing the line referring to the theme (adminbootstraptheme) -- but email the mailing list first, explaining why! The intention is to merge this theme into the Alaveteli core in a future release. -
If you are already using Google Analytics, you are probably including the tracking code manually in your theme. If you'd like to use Alaveteli's support for Google Analytics, set the
GA_CODEingeneral.ymland remove all reference to the tracking code from your theme. -
Here's a list of all the new config variables you might want to change:
THEME_URLSSKIP_ADMIN_AUTHVARNISH_HOSTGA_CODE
This is a hotfix to fix occasional problems importing public body CSVs
This release was mainly to address issue #418, a regression introduced in 0.5, which was causing deployment problems:
- Setting
STAGING_SITE: 0ingeneral.ymland runningscript/rails-post-deploywill ensure the correct behaviour in production environments - It should now be safe to run
rake specon a production server
There is one minor new feature in this release:
- Administrators can follow the auto-login URLs forwarded in emails from users who want support, and they will remain logged in as themselves.
We now have a most of a Czech translation (thanks Josef Pospisil!)
Finally, this release also addresses a number of small bugs, including the (potentially) important issue #408.
As usual, there is a full list of changes on github
- On a production server, ensure that
STAGING_SITEis set to0, and then runscript/rails-post-deployas usual.
- It should now be possible to develop the software on OSX
- Base design refactored: CSS simplified and reduced, base design colours removed, now provided in example Alaveteli theme override
- It is now possible to rebuild the xapian index for specific terms, rather than having to drop and rebuild the entire database every time (as previously). See rake xapian:rebuild_index for more info.
- When listing authorities, show all authorities in default locale, rather than only those in the currently selected locale.
- Ensure incoming emails are only ever parsed once (should give a performance boost)
- Added a simple rate-limiting feature: restrict the number of requests users can make per day, except if explicitly unrestricted in the admin interface
- Full list of changes on github
- IMPORTANT! We now depend on Xapian 1.2, which means you may need to install Xapian from backports. See issue #159 for more info.
- Themes created for 0.4 and below should be changed to match the new format (although the old way should continue to work):
- You should create a resources folder at
<yourtheme>/public/and symlink to it from the main rails app. See theinstall.rbinalaveteli-themeexample theme for details. - Your styles should be moved from
general/custom_css.rhtmlto a standalone stylesheet in<yourtheme>/public/stylesheets/ - The partial at
general/_before_head_end.rhtmlshould be changed in the theme to include this stylesheet
- You should create a resources folder at
- issue #281 fixes some bugs relating to display of internationalised emails. To fix any wrongly displayed emails, you'll need to run the script at
script/clear-cachesso that the caches can be regenerated - During this release, a bug was discovered in pdftk 1.44 which caused it to loop forever. Until it's incorporated into an official release, you'll need to patch it yourself or use the Debian package compiled by mySociety (see link in issue 305)
- Ensure you have values for new config variables (see
config/general.yml-example):- EXCEPTION_NOTIFICATIONS_FROM
- EXCEPTION_NOTIFICATIONS_TO
- The new optional config variable MAX_REQUESTS_PER_USER_PER_DAY can be set to limit the number of requests each user can make per day.
- The recommended Varnish config has changed, so that we ignore more cookies. You should review your Varnish config with respect to the example at
config/varnish-alaveteli.vcl. - Consider setting elinks global config as described in the "Troubleshooting" section of INSTALL.md
- Complete overhaul of design, including improved search, modern look and feel, more twitter links, etc
- A banner alerts visitors from other countries to existing sites in their country, or exhorts them to make their own
- Bounce emails that result from user alerts are automatically processed and hard bouncing accounts do not continue to receive alerts. See the new instructions in INSTALL-exim4.md for details of how to set this up.
- Logged in users now have the ability to download a zipfile of the entire correspondence for a request
- Improved UI for responding to requests. The user now has a single option to "reply" at the bottom of a request, and can adjust who they are replying to on the next page
- Full list of changes on github
- Remember to
rake db:migrateandgit submodule update - Ensure you have values for new config variables (see
config/general.yml-example):- FORWARD_NONBOUNCE_RESPONSES_TO
- TRACK_SENDER_EMAIL
- TRACK_SENDER_NAME
- HTML_TO_PDF_COMMAND
- NEW_RESPONSE_REMINDER_AFTER_DAYS
- FORCE_REGISTRATION_ON_NEW_REQUEST
- The config variable
FRONTPAGE_SEARCH_EXAMPLESis no longer used, so you should remove it to avoid confusion. - Execute
script/rebuild-xapian-indexto create new xapian index terms used in latest version of search (can take a long time) - Install wkhtmltopdf to enable PDFs in downloadable zipfiles. A static binary is recommended on Linux in order to run the command headless: http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/downloads/list
- Ensure your webserver can serve up generated files by symlinking
cache/zips/downloadtopublic/download(this is also done by therails-post-deployscript). If you're using Passenger + Apache, you'll need to add aPassengerResolveSymlinksInDocumentRoot ondirective to the configuration.- Note that the zipfile download functionality will currently hang if you're running Alaveteli single-threaded, as it creates a new request to the server to get the print stylesheet version!
- Configure your MTA to handle bounce emails from alerts (see INSTALL-exim4.md)
- New search filters / UI on request page, authorities page, and search page. Upgrades require a rebuild of the Xapian index (
./script/xapian-index-rebuild). Design isn't beautiful; to be fixed in next release. - Introduce reCaptcha for people apparently coming from foreign countries (to combat spam) (requires values for new config variables
ISO_COUNTRY_CODEandGAZE_URL, and existing config variablesRECAPTCHA_PUBLIC_KEYandRECAPTCHA_PRIVATE_KEY) - Better admin interface for editing multiple translations of a public body at once