Today's update (88c928d) brings with it the following changes:

Performance improvements

• The entire system has been moved to a cloud-based environment, allowing us to better meet future performance requirements. This is the first step to being able to utilize horizontal scaling more extensively.

Enhancements

• The cookie warning at the top of the page has been removed. A link somewhere on the page to our cookie policy is enough according to regulations.
• Anonymous sessions from our server monitoring software should no longer show up in the online list.

Bugfixes

• File uploading has been improved to be even more robust.

Feature removals / deprecations

• The real-time chat feature has been removed, as it was not used by anyone.
• The object attribute client_mimetype has been removed. It is not used by any code.

An emergency update (1f07d10) was pushed out today. It fixed the regression from yesterday's update that broke file uploading. Now it should work again.

Today's update (b827b0037) brings with it the following changes:

Performance improvements

• Upgrade to newest version of Perl (5.24.1) and CPAN modules to get an overall performance improvement.
• The main dropdown menu (top left) is written in a slightly faster way which should make all normal page loads slightly faster.

New features

• When the WYSIWYG editor (TinyMCE) is disabled, which is common for power users, you now get a plain-text editor called CodeMirror which has better editing features than a normal HTML textarea. It has tab indenting, syntax highlighting and code folding, to name a few. It is also possible to customize how you want the editor to function on a site-by-site or user-by-user basis.

Enhancements

• Perlbrew and Pinto are now used to manage Perl and CPAN packages. This ensures we always used the same version of perl and CPAN modules on all installations. This should avoid test failures and other unexpected behavior because different versions of third-party dependencies are used. As this changes a lot of the underlying foundation, there is a higher chance of regressions from this update. Get in touch with support if you notice something out of the ordinary that our testing didn't catch.
• The type of objects which supported WYSIWYG mode and file upload was updated. This should allow e.g. text files to be uploaded to overwrite existing content (you don't have to paste the file into the editor now).
• The first tab in object editor is activated when object type is changed to allow editor to initialize with visible viewport, avoiding potential issues.
• Moved some inline styles in request_add_edit template over to the standard stylesheet, simplifying the template.

Bugfixes

• The default width of 12.5em on textareas from normalize.css was reset, because it conflicts with our usage of rows/cols attributes to set the size of the editor.
• Dropdown boxes rendered using element_select without onchange argument are no longer rendered with an empty onchange attribute, allowing event handlers to be applied normally.
• More modern JavaScript code is now used to show/hide the language metadata dropdown menus in object editor.
• Fixed some JavaScript errors related to TinyMCE when changing type in the object editor.
• Non-ASCII text was sometimes encoded in a wrong way in email headers and when downloading files. This should now be fixed.

Feature removals / deprecations

• The transcode checkbox in the object editor was removed because the video transcoding feature is no longer supported.

Today's update (977e443) brings with it the following changes:

Security issues

• The user self-registration form didn't have any protection against spambots. This caused unwanted user registrations to be added to the database. A captcha question was added to the form to block most naive robots.

Performance improvements

• Used a faster third-party package to perform URL escaping. This should improve performance slightly in a lot of situations.

Enhancements

• It is now possible to list all children of a container in read_container request handler and filesystem template function without checking permissions. You activate it by using a custom_init value of show_all_children=1 on a container.
• The synthetic speech configuration was not kept when loading a new page. The configuration is now persisted for the lifetime of your browser session.
• The confirmation message you get when you send your CEFR placement test report now includes your own email address.

Bugfixes

• The template function link() was not resolving courses. This has now been fixed.

A short maintenance was performed this night to upgrade our backend switch to gigabit speed to improve performance of our database access and backups. The maintenance completed successfully and everything is back to normal. Increased network speed should result in slightly better overall performance.