Better Emoji Support

The Emoji extension now uses the comprehensive EmojiOne set. Type a colon : in the text editor to be presented with a list of Emoji Cheat Sheet codes. Thanks to @sijad for implementing this feature!

Note that text emoticons like :) in existing posts will not be converted to emoji. If desired, this can be fixed on a per-post basis by editing the post, making a small change, and then saving.

Authentication Improvements

Users who haven't confirmed their email address are now able to log in and get their confirmation email resent. Thanks again to @sijad for helping with this one.

When signing up via Facebook, GitHub, or Twitter, the associated profile picture will now automatically be used as the Flarum avatar.

Behind the scenes, the authentication/session/cookies code has been completely reworked for better security and stability.

User Mentions List

Another contribution from @sijad – there's now a Mentions section on user profiles which lists the posts in which a user has been mentioned.

And Much More

While there may only be a few exciting user-facing features added in beta 5, rest assured there are a lot of small tidbits and polish too. Here are a few of the highlights:

• New BBCode tags: DEL, COLOR, CENTER, SIZE (thanks wackymole)
• Complete extraction of all localizable strings (thanks dcsjapan)
• User setting to automatically follow discussions after replying to them
• php flarum info console command to help debug broken installations
• created:YYYY-MM-DD gambit to search for discussions by their creation date (thanks albert221)
• Inline user online indicators (thanks petermein)
• Password confirmation when changing email address
• Permission setting to allow discussion authors to change the tags on their discussion (thanks dbohn)
• Improve post composer appearance/usability on mobile

See the full release notes for all of the juicy details.

Updating from Beta 4

There are some minor changes to the skeleton app in beta 5, which means you'll need to run a few extra commands in order to update. We've removed the extensions directory; instead, extensions are installed into the vendor folder with all the other Composer packages. Additionally, extension Composer package names are now prefixed with flarum-ext.

Most third-party extensions that worked with beta 4 will be incompatible with beta 5. Please disable all third-party extensions before updating. Extension authors, see below for details!

Language packs are extensions too! If you're using any language packs, please make sure that your forum is set to use English as the default language, then disable any third-party language packs you have installed.

Back up your database then run the following commands in your forum's root directory to update to beta 5:

sed -i -e 's/"minimum-stability": "beta"/"minimum-stability": "beta",\'$'\n''    "prefer-stable": true/' composer.json
remove=""; require=""; for extension in akismet approval auth-facebook auth-github auth-twitter bbcode emoji english flags likes lock markdown mentions pusher sticky subscriptions suspend tags; do remove="$remove flarum/$extension"; require="$require flarum/flarum-ext-$extension=^0.1.0"; done
composer self-update
composer remove flarum/composer-installer $remove -q
composer require $require
composer update
php flarum migrate
rm -Rf assets/*.js assets/*.css storage/cache/* storage/formatter/* storage/views/*

Windows users: instead of running the sed, composer remove, and composer require commands above, you'll need to manually patch your composer.json file.

If you have problems, please start a new discussion in the Support tag and we'll do our best to help you!

For Extension Authors

Beta 5 includes some changes to the Extension API which you'll need to update your extensions for:

• The structure of database migration files has been simplified, breaking any extension with migration files that didn't rewrite accordingly. This post explains the details.

• If your extension extends the frontend, you'll need to update the flarum-gulp version constraint in your package.json files to ^0.2.0 and run npm update.

• For language pack authors, a new helper has been added which lets you remove a lot of the boilerplate code from your bootstrap.php file. Simply replace it with this one.

• There are various other minor changes to the Extension API. Please start a discussion in the Dev tag or chat to us on Gitter if beta 5 breaks your extension in any way that you don't know how to fix.

What's Next?

Exciting things!

To start with, we know that five months is a long time to wait, and we want to speed up our release process so you can enjoy more new stuff earlier. With that in mind, we'll be shooting for a beta 6 release in six weeks.

Though we may not be able to get all of it done, the focus for beta 6 will be:

• Formatting buttons and full-screen preview in the post composer
• Private Discussions extension
• Various other improvements and bug fixes

We will also be starting work on a web installer for those of you unaquainted with SSH

Thank You

A huge thank you to my fellow core dev @Franz for his ongoing committment to this project. Thanks to all of the others who have contributed code to this release: Luceos, sijad, dcsjapan, mael Albert221, ahsanity, petermein, bogdanteodoru, JoshyPHP, dbohn, opi, cmaas, and anyone else who I've missed!

Thank you to the Flarum staff (@Luceos, @Dominion, @jordanjay29, @BlackSheep, @Kulga) who have been moderating and managing the community, allowing us devs to focus on being lazy development. You guys are the best!

Finally, thank you for your ongoing support, donations, and enthusiasm that make me excited to work on Flarum whenever I can.