I'm having the same error after upgrading... but it happens when a user try to register! This is a bad day for an error... I just invited some important partners to my community...

Now I discovered that embedded content are not working either.

Please copy the files for 1.7.11 over 1.7.12: http://elgg.org/getelgg.php?forward=elgg-1.7.11.zip

It looks like there is a serious bug with 1.7.12

oucherzzz !!!
i wish we could get (small) group of (dedicated) testers
for pre-release elgg behaviour checking to preempt this.

can_write_to_container used to call $container->canEdt($user_guid) but now it's using $user->getGUID as parameter.  This breaks a lot of plugins since most of them rely on can_write_to_container when trying to add menu links to "add <insert object here".  

So it will mostly break for say blog posts which are set to public and a non-logged in user accesses the read page for that post. And would break as well for other plugins when accessed by non-logged in users.

Thanks Cash.

So, the reason 1.7.12 is no longer available from elgg to download is because it is broken. Am I understanding this correctly?

I've been busy all day without a chance to test out 1.7.12 in light of these reports. Looking at the code, I saw an error. That combined with the serious nature of those reports led me to pull 1.7.12 from the download page.

The bug was introduced in a fix for another bug. We must either find a better fix for that bug or fix the new one. After that has been done and tested, a new release will be made.

For those that like plenty of details, this deals with checking access to content. The bug had something to do with checking access for logged in users to group content (I think). The problem is that the change affected checks for access from logged out users and the code was not tested for that. The function documentation did not mention that the function is also used for logged out users.

The 1.7.x branch of releases has been very stable and we want to keep it that way.

The bug was introduced in a fix for another bug.

@Cash... can you say what is that fix-bug? Maybe we help with something.