Hi everyone!
We are pleased to announce the release of Totara Social 3.0 today!
This release contains a major theme redesign to improve the way people interact with the site, its features, and its content. Over the past year we put a lot of effort into the UX improvements and bringing social interactions closer to where people would expect to find them. Search functionality has been updated to make sure that search is always there when people need it and things will not get lost once they are off the front page. Also among new features, groups administrator can now embed external feeds into their groups' activity streams and curate what appears on the group feed. Many other large and small changes have been added to improve the overall user experience and engagement. We are looking forward to your feedback!
Please note that this release also introduces a number of changes to the minimum system requirements. We recommend that you test the upgrade first on a COPY of your production site, to make sure that everything works as you expect.
Here is a changelog for Totara Social 3.0:
Release 3.0 (15th February 2018)
==================================================
Changes to minimum system requirements:
Language:
* PHP version must be 5.6.6 or greater
Database server:
* PostgreSQL version must be 9.4 or greater
* MySQL version must be 5.7.11 or greater
- MySQL now requires innodb_large_prefix=1
- Added support for utf8mb4
* Added support for MariaDB 10.2.x
PHP extensions:
* exif (optional) recommended for image rotation support
Desktop browser (the latest stable release):
* Chrome
* Firefox
* Safari
* Microsoft Internet Explorer version 11
* Microsoft Edge
Mobile browsers (the latest stable release):
* iOS Safari 9
* Android browser
* Chrome for Android
Search engine (required in Totara Social 3.0):
* Elasticsearch search engine version 5.x
Important:
TS-802 Totara Social now supports PHP7 and PHP7.1
Note that support for these versions has not been backported to the older
stable releases.
TS-837 Smarty template engine
Dwoo template engine has been replaced by Smarty which has very similar
code style to Dwoo, improved rendering performance, and support for PHP7.
TS-935 XMLRPC auth plugin has been deprecated
'Networking' is hidden by default and XMLRPC is disabled on fresh install.
TS-1846 New site registration system
A new site registration page is available under Administration Home >
Totara registration.
Please ensure you have the registration code available for each site before
you upgrade. Partners can obtain the registration code for their customers'
sites via the Subscription Portal. Direct subscribers will receive their
registration code directly from Totara Learning.
For more information see the help documentation:
https://help.totaralearning.com/display/TLE/Totara+registration
TS-819 Added support for Elasticsearch 5, re-designed the search results page, and
made instant search always available in the site header
Elasticsearch search engine is now required during installation and upgrade
Completely re-worked site navigation, user and group homepages, content browsing and
creation, layout of pages, and various page elements. The changes include, but are not
limited to the following:
- Improved mobile navigation and user interface
- Changed overall site page layout width
- Standardised margins/padding/font across the site
- Added new top and side navigation
- Added new user profile sub-navigation
- Moved administration menu to the side navigation
- User profile page, group homepage, and user homepage are no longer
configurable pages (configurable pages are still available as a part of
content labelled as 'Legacy' home/profile pages)
- Added new 'Groups' page to user sub-navigation
- Added new 'Connections' page to user sub-navigation
- Added new 'Explore' pages for content browsing
- Added new 'My content' page for browsing of personal content
- Simplified the content creation from 'Quick post' area on homepage
TS-1139 Added gulp and lib-sass support for theming
See /theme/Readme.md for more information
TS-1031 Added new flex_icon class to render FontAwesome icons across the site
TS-1631 Added local dataroot handling
See /lib/config-defaults.php for more information on how local dataroot can
be configured
New features:
TS-380 New improved PHPUnit testing framework
TS-986 Behat integration
TS-1133 New "Activity Stream" module which can be used to render activity
streams in blocks and on static pages
TS-1124 New "Quickpost" module (a replacement for the "Quick content" block)
TS-764 Added external feeds integration into the group activity streams.
Group administrators can now add RSS/Atom feeds and AndersPink briefings
to their group streams
TS-519 Added group blogs feature
TS-664 Added expiry period to "Get Started" sideblock
TS-796 Added quick upload (drag and drop) of files in "Quick post" area
TS-882 Added a third party library register
TS-405 Added blocks drag and drop for page editing on mobile devices
TS-982 Added a new purge caches script and general improvements to caching
TS-944 Added user details popover to the users that have been mentioned
TS-1255 Added "Totara Connect" plugin client service support
TS-1304 Added user and group banner images
TS-1548 Added composer auto-loading for \TotaraSocial namespace classes
TS-1226 Added unsubscribe link to emails that does not require users to log-in
TS-1350 Added the ability to share a link to a topic reply
Improvements:
TS-1018 Improved group creation workflow
TS-954 New look of forum and topic pages in groups
TS-875 Improved 'Latest forum posts' block to aggregate from multiple groups
TS-786 Miscellaneous improvements to the activity streams:
- improved the display of activities
- removed content type labels and changed activity messages
- an original activity is now displayed in the comment activities
- activities now show the content where the mention took place
- added 'Copy URL' button to the social networks sharing
- improved new user welcome message
- added checks for external image loading
- improved the display of image galleries
TS-1874 Performance improvements of the home stream
TS-792 Added chat link next to the user's name in a list of online users
TS-972 Added profile information block to the default user profile page
TS-913 Images are now embedded in the html emails
TS-1070 Added resizing profile images on upload
TS-1074 Added the ability to mention yourself
TS-1094 Refactored feed reader to support both RSS and Atom feeds
TS-1106 Reworked email sending logic
TS-1327 Improved email exception handling and testing
TS-1326 Made sure images embedded in emails are resized on sending
TS-1014 Switched to system fonts in Raw theme, inheriting into Default theme
TS-970 Added a new "Public" group label to make it clear when a group is public
TS-705 Simplified connection requests workflow
TS-710 Made sure 'image' terminology is consistent throughout the system
TS-899 Improved usability of inviting users to a group
TS-1825 Refactored comments storing
TS-1166 Refactored connection info storing and improved performance of SQL
query used to display user mentions dropdown
TS-1551 Added support for SVG in image uploads in logos and banners
TS-1509 Added 'Recommended' sorting in Groups and People pages
TS-1868 Updated file browser user interface
TS-1300 Added topic actions to the topic pages
TS-1511 Group admin can now invite people to any group where invitations
are possible
TS-1512 Group admins can now send invitations from open groups
TS-1498 Updated truncate_html() to handle more complex cases
TS-1767 Made sure mentions appear after typing @ and added hint
TS-1700 Made sure any character is allowed before the mentions
TS-1296 Adjusted primary theme colours to improve site accessibility
TS-1448 Added support for image rotation on file upload
TS-1486 Standardised modal dimensions with flexible resizing
TS-1506 Allowed original posters to manage their topics until the first reply
TS-1416 Users are no longer allowed to disable connection requests
TS-1123 Items shared with the group are now displayed in the group stream
TS-1109 Improved multibyte string handling and UTF-8 cleanup
TS-1228 Added new default Pieform renderer
Database schema and API changes
=======================
Database schema and API changes are now described in upgrade.txt files in plugins.
Other notable changes
=====================
TS-310 Removed Leap2A and HTML export/import plugins
TS-663 Removed likes not related to content
TS-975 Removed 'Users can hide real names' setting
TS-1821 Removed the tag cloud sideblock
TS-687 Removed retractable option in blocks
TS-1136 Removed unnecessary FreeType support check
TS-1224 Removed 'folder' artefact type. Existing folder structure has been
translated into labels to tag the folder content
TS-715 Removed some superfluous general account options ("Maximum tags in cloud",
"Enable HTML editor", "Show 'Get started' block")
TS-1823 Removed superfluous HTML editor settings
Third party libraries changes
=============================
Updated jQuery library to version 3.3.1
Updated jQuery UI to version 1.12.1
Updated ADOdb to version 5.20.7
Updated TinyMCE Editor to version 4.7.6
Updated PDF.js to version 1.9.426
Updated PHPMailer to version 6.0.3
Updated VideoJS to version 6.7.1
Updated CookieConsent to version 3.0.6
Updated SVGGraph to version 2.26.0
Updated jQuery At.js to version 1.5.4
Updated Caret.js to version 0.3.1
Updated MobileDetect library to version 2.8.30
Updated File upload plugin to version 9.19.0
Updated html2text library to version 4.1.0
Updated HTMLPurifier to version 4.9.3
Updated Modernizr to version 3.5.0
Added Smarty version 3.1.31
Added Lightgallery version 0.0.3
Added Justified Layout version 2.1.0
Added Clipboard-js version 1.7.1
Added Elasticsearch-php library 5.3.2
Removed PEAR PHP extension library
Removed Dwoo library
Removed password_compat library
Removed MochiKit Javascript library
Removed Elastica library
