Public Technical Preview 4

We're continuing our practice of releasing regular Public Technical Previews. Many features were planned for this release, but due to the outbreak of war in Ukraine, as well as some developers' exams, only 4 of the 23 goals were accomplished. Yet, it doesn't mean there weren't any changes to OpenVK, just many of them were unplanned ones. It's been 5 months since the last release, and 290 commits have been made in that time.

Please note that Public Technical Preview versions are still not recommended for production use. Use them at your own risk.

What's Changed

• Photos now use miniatures to save traffic.
• Notes list now has a new style.
• Enforced usage of non-empty, correct profile names.
• Users can set hometown in their profile.
• Nicknames are now considered in user searches.
• Error 404 for deleted user pages now looks consistent
• Site admins can now see first known IPs of users.
• Video uploading is now supported on Windows.
• Support agents can now prevent users from creating tickets.
• Site admins can now easily unban users.
• Added support for Matomo analytics.
• Search is now restricted to authorized users.
• New notification sound.
• Site admins can now place alerts on groups.
• /about page now shows 30 top groups.
• E-Mail addresses can now be changed in settings.
• Added the ability to top up user's balance through the cryptocurrency TON.
• Cookies notification now shows up.
• Various fixes.
• Localization updates.

Full Changelog: public_preview_3...public_preview_4

Installation

1. Install PHP 7.4, web-server, Composer, Node.js, Yarn and Chandler

• PHP 8 has not yet been tested, so you should not expect it to work.

2. Unpack the OpenVK PTP 4 archive into the /path/to/chandler/extensions/available/openvk directory and install commitcaptcha like this:

git clone https://github.com/openvk/commitcaptcha /path/to/chandler/extensions/available/commitcaptcha

3. And enable them:

ln -s /path/to/chandler/extensions/available/commitcaptcha /path/to/chandler/extensions/enabled/
ln -s /path/to/chandler/extensions/available/openvk /path/to/chandler/extensions/enabled/

4. Import install/init-static-db.sql to same database you installed Chandler to
   4.1. Import all sqls from install/sqls except 00026-EVENTDB-emoji-support.sql to same database
5. Import install/init-event-db.sql to separate database
   5.1. Import install/sqls/00026-EVENTDB-emoji-support.sql to same database
6. Copy openvk-example.yml to openvk.yml and change options
7. Run composer install in OpenVK directory
8. Move to Web/static/js and execute yarn install
9. Set openvk as your root app in chandler.yml

Once you are done, you can login as a system administrator on the network itself (no registration required):

• Login: admin@localhost.localdomain6
• Password: admin
  • It is recommended to change the password before using the built-in account.

(Outdated) full example installation instruction for CentOS 8 is also available here.

Upgrading

1. Update Chandler
2. Unpack the OpenVK PTP 4 archive over existing openvk directory
3. Import sqls from install/sqls starting from 00018-email-verification.sql to 00025-toncoin-fetching.sql to database you installed Chandler to
4. Import install/sqls/00026-EVENTDB-emoji-support.sql to events database
5. Run composer install in OpenVK directory
6. Move to Web/static/js and execute yarn install
7. Execute openvkctl build-images

Contributors

We want to thank all of our developers and translators: @Holoniix, @celestora, @veselcraft, @maksalees, @rudzik8, @ayaaop, @WerySkok, @aupn, @apeeh, @KosFurler, @SigmaTel71, @E2r7hN07Fl47, @themohooks, @HSDChannel.