Say hello to Etherpad 1.4

Today we’re proud to announce Etherpad 1.4. Let’s be honest here, there are no killer features in this release however this release does contain LOTS of bug-fixes and security patches. All of the killer features exist as Plugins, once you upgrade Etherpad we suggest you check out the available plugins because some really great ones exist.

Why should I upgrade?

  • Various server and client stability patches
  • Various security patches
  • Various new hooks and methods (to support the plugins we talked about earlier)
  • Internal stats and metrics
  • Improved Docs
  • Moar

Anything special worth noting?

The introduction of a more modular toolbar means you might want to upgrade your settings.json, adding the new toolbar objects. To do this simply copy the toolbar objects from the settings.json.template, this is optional though and not required.

Why so long?

We have been crazy busy. We have hundreds of organizations that now run Etherpad and our team has mostly been focusing on integrating with their platforms and resolving their issues. Thankfully those companies have allowed us to commit back to the open source project both to core and as plugins, also John got busy with a new startup.

How do I upgrade

Simple.
git pull && /etc/init.d/etherpad restart

Show me the money!

Grab Etherpad 1.4 now

Etherpad 1.4 — RC1 available for testing

You can now test the first release candidate of the upcoming 1.4 release!

The most apparent change should be stability. We have tried to take care of lots of bugs that caused frequent crashes and corrupt pads in the past. Still, a few new features have made it in, such as support for recording metrics. Other new features are mostly under the hood to make the lives of admins and plugin developers easier. For details refer to the preliminary list of changes.

If you want to test this release, fetch the latest changes from github and checkout tag “1.4.0-rc1”. A list of things that need testing is available on the following pad. Please report your findings on github (or drop us a note on the pad). Also, if you have successfully tested an item on the list, please add a note there, too.

Things to test: http://beta.etherpad.org/test-release-candidate

Thank you, everyone!

Etherpad One Line Install

I read recently Etherpad is more difficult than other collaborative editors to install. Before today it took a whole 2 lines.. Today it’s one line for Debby/Ubuntu/Linux Mint heros..

Copy / Paste below to your CLI to install Etherpad:

wget etherpad.org/downloads/etherpad-1.3.deb -O etherpad-1.3.deb && sudo dpkg -i etherpad-1.3.deb

Hopefully we will have an apt package / ppa repo sorted soon but for now this should suffice :)

If this doesn’t work for you please let us know.

Getting started contributing

So you are new to Etherpad or contributing to Open source and you want to know how you can get started helping out the Etherpad foundation spread the goodness that is Etherpad. We’re always looking for new people to join our fellow Etherpadians, we have one motto of “Ask forgiveness not permission” so get started doing your thing and don’t be scared of doing something wrong.

Here are some things we need help with..

Writing blog posts

Knowledge required: General Etherpad knowledge, good writing skills and experience with publishing content on WordPress
Getting started: Draft a blog post and email it through, if we like it we will publish it on blog.etherpad.org. Alternatively self publish on your own blog and bump us and we will help promote it. If we’re comfortable after a few posts with you we will give you author access on blog.etherpad.org.

Engaging with potential Etherpadians on Social Media

Knowledge required: General Etherpad knowledge and experience with Social Media platform strategies such as Faceache, Reddit and Twitter
Getting started: Scan Social networks for people chatting about Etherpad or Etherpad alternatives and engage with them to inform them of what they can/can’t use Etherpad for and how they can leverage Etherpad to improve their life, forever.. Create new conversations with the goal to enlighten people to how awesome Etherpad.

Answering questions

Knowledge required: General Etherpad knowledge and experience with QA platforms such as Quora & stack overflow
Getting started: Hunt down people questions being asked about Etherpad and provide a clear answer to their question. Earn badges, free princesses.

Running Tests and replicating issues

Knowledge required: General Etherpad knowledge, Basic Github user experience and git experience
Getting started: Find open issues and try to replicate them on your own Etherpad instance. Update the issue to confirm the issue if the issue does exist. You may be asked by a code contributor to test a fix too, for this you may need basic git experience but it’s not required.

Creating tutorial and demonstration videos

Knowledge required: General Etherpad knowledge and experience with video publishing platforms such as Vimeo or that one that got f***** in the a** by Google+
Getting started: Review existing tutorial videos, find some ones we’re missing, create some video guides and upload them to your favorite video sharing website. We don’t have an official channel or anything fancy, feel free to make one!

Writing plugins

Knowledge required: General Etherpad Knowledge, Javascript, jQuery, NodeJS, Npm and Git experience
Getting started: Look at some example plugins and modify them to do what you want. Look at the open plugin requests on Github and the Etherpad feedback/voting platform. Once you are happy with your plugin publish it to npm and ask the mailing list for feedback.

Contributing code

Knowledge required: Javascript, NodeJS, Git
Getting started: Read the wiki articles and contributing guidelines first, then look through the open issues and submit pull requests for anything you can resolve.

Creating marketing tools such as infographics

Knowledge required: General Etherpad knowledge and experience with image manipulation packages such as Gimp
Getting started: Create some marketing material such as memes from the 90s, put it online and send it through to us and we will spam it about on social media and other places.

Providing Translations

Knowledge required: Fluent in more than one language, minor experience with using the TranslateWiki service
Getting started: Find something that is missing a translation and add it on our translation page.

Writing Tests

Knowledge required: General Etherpad Knowledge, Javascript, jQuery, Travis, Mocha, NodeJS and Git experience
Getting started: Look at the frontend tests that already exist and search through the issues and wiki for outstanding issues

Security testing

Knowledge required: General security / pen testing knowledge and ideally general Javascript, HTTP and Git knowledge.
Getting started: Install Etherpad locally and attack it, patch Etherpad Develop Branch and submit a pull request with a fix then let us know before going public as per a relatively sensible security disclosure policy.

Releasing new versions of Etherpad

Knowledge required: Basic writing experience, some windows experience, basic Etherpad experience, git experience.
Getting started: Create a release pull request following our release guide.

General Foundation Admin

Knowledge required: General Etherpad knowledge and Basic Admin knowledge
Getting started: Contact us and when a general inquiry/request hits our inbox we will forward it through to you to forward through to the correct party.

Releasing Etherpad 1.3

Ouch. As you have probably noticed, the last release had a painful bug in it — we had accidentally switched two lines, which lead to really bad performance on production instances.

Of course we fixed this in the new release, which should now really solve most of your problems. Thus, it is called (and I am proud to announce that starting with this version we’ll be following the spec for semantic versioning): Etherpad 1.3

  • NEW: We now follow the semantic versioning scheme!
  • NEW: Option to disable IP logging
  • NEW: Localisation updates from http://translatewiki.net.
  • Fix: Fix readOnly group pads
  • Fix: don’t fetch padList on every request

 

Don’t hesitate, git pull today! And as always: spread the word, share the love!

1+2 =12 — release of v1.2.12

Hello dear etherfolks,

turns out we haven’t kept our promise: Contrary to previous statements this is not v1.3, as you may have noticed. Development velocity has seen a slight drop in the past moths, as people have been busy with other stuff.

Still you shouldn’t be sad, because waiting to be pulled as part of v1.2.12 are a bunch of brightly-shining fixes (including a rock-solid security patch for an intimidating security hole!) plus a few new fluffy features. This release should make your life a whole lot easier:

* NEW: Add explanations for more disconnect scenarios
* NEW: export sessioninfos so plugins can access it
* NEW: pass pad in postAceInit hook
* NEW: Add trustProxy setting (use X-forwarded-for as remoteAddress)
* NEW: userLeave hook
* NEW: Plural macro for translations
* NEW: backlinks to main page in Admin pages
* NEW: New translations from translatewiki.net
* SECURITY FIX: Filter author data sent to clients
* FIX: Never keep processing a changeset if it’s corrupted
* FIX: Some client-side performance fixes for webkit browsers
* FIX: Only execute listAllPads query on demand (not on start-up)
* FIX: various issues with HTML import
* FIX: check if uploaded file only contains ascii chars when abiword disabled
* FIX: Plugin search in /admin/plugins
* FIX: Don’t create new pad if a non-existant read-only pad is accessed
* FIX: Drop messages from unknown connections
* FIX: API: fix createGroupFor endpoint, if mapped group is deleted
* FIX: Import form for other locales
* FIX: Don’t stop processing changeset queue if there is an error
* FIX: Caret movement. Chrome detects blank rows line heights as incorrect
* FIX: allow colons in password
* FIX: Polish logging of client-side errors on the server
* FIX: Username url param
* FIX: Make start script POSIX compatible

As always, if you like etherpad why not pitch in and help push etherpad to the next level! We have ambitious plans!

Git pull today, and happy collaborating!

Important security update

TLDR; PadId was being broadcast to Read Only Clients.

Vileda discovered an issue where in certain conditions the pad ID of a user was being broadcast to users on a Rad Only Pad.

We fixed the issue within minutes of hearing about it (24 minutes to be precise).

You will need to checkout develop to get this security patch, we will be doing a major release soon-ish.

We will release specific details in a few weeks once everyone has patched up.


git checkout develop
git pull
/etc/init.d/etherpad-lite restart

Should be all you need for now.

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