Elgg Blog: Elgg 1.7.4 released

Elgg 1.7.4 has been released!  Download a copy and upgrade today!

Elgg 1.7.4 is mostly a bugfix release, but has two notable new features:

  1. Twitter Services has been upgrade to use oAuth and extended for easier support of 3rd party plugins.  For users, this means The Wire will post to Twitter again.  For developers, this means you can easily integrate Twitter in your plugins.  Because of changes to Twitter's API, this requires additional configuration for both the admins and users.  This API was originally a 1.8 feature so documentation is still sparse, but watch the blog for a post on how to write plugins that can tweet!
  2. Added a new admin section to manage unvalidated users.  A very common problem for new users on Elgg sites is validating their account through email.  To help with this we've added an admin section so admin users can manually validate accounts, delete accounts, or resend the validation links.

The bugfixes include:

 

 

  • WSOD fixed when viewing an invalid profile page.
  • Checking for mismatched passwords earlier in registration to avoid creating a user who can never log in and wasting a username/email.
  • Group file widget only shows when Files are enabled for the group.
  • Fixed misformatting of some group forum posts in the River.
  • Non-English languages work when using memcache.
  • CSS is correctly cached for newly enabled plugins.
  • Can no longer add bookmarks without a title. Previous bookmarks with out titles can now be deleted.
As always, the complete changes are in CHANGES.txt and ChangeLog.  Finding bugs?  Please report them to Trac so we can fix them in the next version!
  • Thanks Brett for releasing of this  valuable version. Lot of things are covered. As you mentioned in previous posts 1.7.4 has only 54 database queries. Is these queries are after enable all plugins or without plugins. You did not mention any thing in bug fix about speed up things. Can you please tell me how much fast this version is as compared to previous release or how much difference in database queries.

    BTW thanks for your efforts.

  • Step 3 of the Upgrade docs, says blandly:

    Overwrite your existing Elgg files.

    Does that mean ...

    3A. Download the elgg-1.7.4.zip to my PC, ...

    3B. Upload it into the home directory (e.g. /public_html) of my server...

    3C. Extract/Inflate that .zip file, over-writing my existing Elgg files...

    3D. Not worry about my additional plugins in /mod folder, because they will not be overwritten ..

    ???

  • @ghumanz - The changes I referenced were made in 1.5 or so, not in 1.7.4's development.  I just happened to have a clean installation of 1.7.4 and used it to see how many queries are called.  No speed improvements were made in 1.7.4.

    @Stephan - Additional plugins in mod/ won't be overwritten as long as you're unzipping like that.  If you use an FTP client and it asks you to replace the mod/ dir instead of only replacing the duplicate files WITHIN that dir, it will essentially delete mod/ and then put the new version in there.  Good FTP clients shouldn't do this, but it's something to be careful about.

     

     

  • Successfully Upgraded to 1.7.4 no problem found. Enable all plugin no css issue accured. Still testing. But still not added eager widget to core which was very important to speed up profile widgets.

    For those who are new here, Steps followed:-

    1) copy all old modified plugins to mod directory.

    2) copy redirect profile lines and memory settings to new .htaccess file.

    3) Copy settings .php file to engine.

    4 ) copy images to _graphics folder.

    5) Copy all my modified file to page elements.

    6) I have copy my old css.php file to new dir because I have modified it according to my theme.

    7) Before copy to home dir remove tick from simple cache and file path.

    8) backup all old file from home dir and delete all old files.

    9) extract all files from my modified new folder with 1.7.4 and that's all 

    10) Run www.stename.com\upgrade.php

    11) Disable and enable all plugins once  and finally click on simple cache and file_ path to remember.

    Done.

     

    Thanks to Cash and Brett

  • I attempted an upgrade of 1.7.3 but something somewhere went awry.. 

    so I figured i'd test a straight 1.7.4 install with no upgrade..

    so far I've found that the widget links plugin causes WSOD..

    and regardless of that, when I click the 'site administration' link in the admin area I see a white page that reads:

    "This admin panel allows you to control global settings for your site. Choose an option below to get started."

     

    any idea what's causing either?

    thanks

  • "This admin panel allows you to control global settings for your site. Choose an option below to get started." -- is normal stuff.

    What is the "widget links plugin" ? --> "Widget Title Links 0.3" ??
    That PlugIn is almost one year old ;-) WSOD does not surpise ...

  • @tunist - the white page with text sounds like a bad file. I recommend copying the files over again.

    Also, not doing an upgrade is going to cause problems down the road.

  • the widget links plugin worked ok in the previous versions, so I figured I'd share that.

    when I said I didn't do an upgrade.. what I meant was that I downloaded 1.7.4 and did a totally fresh install of it, without any reference to any old data or code.. so there's no hangover from previous files.

  • I just enabled "Widget Title Links 0.3" on my XAMPP's Elgg 1.7.4.... works oki ;-) Try redoing the upload for that PlugIn as suggested above  then verify that all the files are indeed up there. There's been problems seen before with bad FTP's of code giving WSOD.

  • Ok, I've now redownloaded and reinstalled a fresh setup of 1.7.4.

    I found that the 'site admininstration' page 'whiteout' is caused by enabling izap_videos latest version.. If I disable it the page displays correctly.

    widget links is now ok here too.. maybe it was a conflict of plugins in some way.. i have quite a few installed.

  • definitely got some bugs here with registration too.

    i'm running profile manager and vazco mainpage.. when I create a new user and login/logout.. the whole site fails.. i have to manually type in the logout url and then login with the admin account to access the site again.

  • Upgrade 1 test site and 2 production sites from 1.7.3 to 1.7.4 and all went well.

  • Brett,

    A couple questions.  had a plugin called "threaded forums" running a while back. I thought it made the discussion in groups threaded, like a forum. I am pretty certain I am now seeing this funcstion in 1.7.4 without even having the threaded forums plug installed. Was this threaded function added to the core plugin? Als now Vazco Gmap now runs without Siteaccess.

    There seems to be some witchy magic with Elgg so I look to you for logical explainations.

     

  • Elgg 1.7.x does not have threaded forums. It is under consideration for 1.8

  • Got a msg from my host (A2 Hosting) that Softaculous script updates for Elgg 1.7.4 are available.

    Can I just make my backups, and use this? Is it recommended?

    Should we disable all plugins before an upgrade, whether doing it manually or via a Softaculous script?

     

  • The 1.7.4 upgrade does not change the database or perform changes to the data directory. It is a code upgrade only. As such you should be able to upgrade by copying the new code over the old code and run the upgrade script (which sets the version number in the database). I assume that is what Softaculous is doing.

    My upgrade procedure is

    • mirror my current site
    • test upgrade process with plugins turned on
    • fix any issues (and repeat these steps until they aren't any issues)
    • back up production site
    • upgrade production site

    If you are not going to test the upgrade first, then I do recommend turning off 3rd party plugins.

  • Anyone help me find a place with free themes for version 1.7.    It does not appear that many sources are available to view themes.   Not many choices.  Looking for places to view and choose a theme.  Thanks

  • @mygoodprofile - This is a thread about upgrading to 1.7.4.  Please keep your posts related to that.

  • Brett just to clarify again, 1.7.4 running clean in my installs, had a conflict in Vazco userURL plugin and Mike will work on that. Man do we need a permanent fix for short URL's, another one of many "deal breakers" for me...

    • Checking for mismatched passwords earlier in registration to avoid creating a user who can never log in and wasting a username/email.

    Great! But this still isn't fixed in actions/useradd.php (which is called when the admin is creating a user). The user is created before the passwords are checked, but since they don't match the user isn't validated, resulting in the same wasted username and email. I filed a new bug report for 1.7.4.

  • This post belongs right here, so don't bother questioning that!!

    I am so freaking out. One of my best customers has been telling me for six months he has trouble registering. I of course believe him, since I know Elgg very well. I just tried to register for him (how pathetic!). I got "the email you used wasn't valid". 

    Okay, great. I tried again, thinking I hadn't even put an email in (I have a few fields to fill out) and I thought "hey maybe I missed pasting John's email in the field". Well the next atempt to register it said "That username already exists". Okay, so whatever the %$#@ this computer is telling me, I am an idot and it;s time for Monday Nite Football (and I am thinking this and I am the webmaster!).

    So I log in as admin and guess friggin what? His first registration I did is there! No photo icon (but it's there!). You work back through the logic of what I did and what Elgg told me happened or didn't happen!

    I am as UNSURE as ever whether anyone gets a registartion done in this crazy system!!! Off to the pub!!!

     

  • How do you get a registration error that says "the email you used wasn't valid" and later log in and that profile is resgistered? Can anything like this be due to plugins or whatever else?

  • Tahoe....I am having the same problem....any resolution?

  • Elgg has a few major roadblocks in it's development path. This is one. Stay tuned.

  • Ever since upgrading to 1.7.4, my users have not been receiving an email to validate their new accounts.  This has forced me to have to validate each new user individually using the new admin section to manage unvalidated users.  Tonight I decided to try to fix this issue by replacing uservalidationbyemail with one from an earlier elgg release, so far it seems to have fixed the issue. I Hope this helps someone.

     

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