Movim 0.21, codename Whipple, is finally out!

Let's have a look of all the new and improved things that you can find in this big #release 🥳

Message replies

You can now reply to messages thanks to the implementation of the XEP-0461: Message Replies.

More and more clients in the XMPP ecosystem supports this feature, including Slidge, new XMPP gateways project that is allowing you to bridge Movim with Telegram, Discord and many others chat platforms.

Push Notifications

Movim now integrates WebPush. Never miss a message, even when Movim is closed. This feature is also working when you install Movim as a Progressive Web App on your Android or iOS device.

Improved account configuration

The configuration panel has been redesigned to be more accessible.

You can now block contacts directly from your Movim instance and manage your block-list from the panel.

Microphones and webcams can also be configured and tested from the Audio & Video configuration tab.

New emojis

This version brings the support of Unicode 14 and many new emojis that you can use in your messages, posts, replies and reactions.

Redesign

Movim is following the #Material Design guidelines since 2014. This release is bringing a fresh redesign of the components and animations based on Material 3.

The main menu was reorganized to clarify the navigation and hide the second-level pages in a sub-menu that appears when hovering the account item.

Following this redesign Movim accounts can now set a banner next to their avatars.

Share and Send To

The Send To feature, that allows you to send articles to contacts was completed by a Share feature allowing you to share the article in a new publication on your personnal blog on in a Community that you're in. Useful to share things around !

Audio messages

Movim can now play and record #audio messages.

Gallery Communities

When creating or configuring your Communities you can now set a Community type. The Gallery Community forces the publications to contain at least one image and display them as a grid.

This feature is the result of a long clarification and standardization work made on XMPP Pubsub with the pubsub#type attribute, the introduction of a new XEP based on that change called XEP-0472: Pubsub Social Feed and the support of pubsub#type in ejabberd (related ticket).

Performances, memory consumption and stability

A very important work was done to limit the Movim processes memory consumption.

The daemon and subprocesses are now using PHP Opcache to load and share only once lots of files that were previously loaded multiple time during the Movim runtime. PHP modules are also loaded using a predefined whitelist to limit the usage of useless modules in memory.

DotEnv configuration

The old configuration system has been moved to the DotEnv standard. This change merges all the previous configuration (database, daemon and paths) into an unique .env file.

They can also be set using environment variable directly in your Docker Compose, or Web Server (using SetEnvin Apache for example).

The official Movim Docker image was also updated to fit those changes.

Migration from Movim 0.20

If you are planning to upgrade your current Movim instance please follow those few steps:

1. Copy and rename the .env.example file in .env and complete the few configuration variables in it. They should be the same as the one you set in the previous db.inc.php file and your daemon parameters.
2. Remove the db.inc.php file
3. Remove all the daemon.php parameters from your init.d, systemd services or other scripts. The daemon launch command should look this way: $ php daemon.php start.

...and as always, don't forget to run the migrations (php composer.phar movim:migrate) and restart your daemon.

XMPP Pubsub node security and restrictions

Movim 0.21 is not trusting anymore posts, likes and comments that are not containing the explicit identifier (Jabber ID) of the publisher and therefore now rely on this part of the XEP-0060: Pubblish-Subscribe - 12.16 Associating Events and Payloads with the Generating Entity.

All the existing likes and comments might be not counted anymore or seen as "Non trusted" ones. All the new published ones will be configured properly.

Migration from Movim 0.20

On ejabberd

You can update all the existing stored node configuration to force the new default configuration using the following SQL request. You might do a backup of your database before doing such changes:

update pubsub_node_option set val = `publisher` where name = `itemreply` and val = `none`

...and load those changes without restarting ejabberd:

$ ejabberdctl clear-cache

On Prosody

Ensure that you have the expose_publisher = true set in your configuration, see the related documentation.

What's next?

Movim 0.22 should include two big projects.

OMEMO rewrite ?

The cleanup, rewrite and refactoring of the OMEMO support that is quite buggy and not opmized. We are not promising anything on this side, OMEMO is always a complex beast to handle.

Multi-part audio and video-conference feature

The audio and video conferencing features were already introduced a few years ago in Movim. Some preparation work has been done in this 0.21 release to be able merge back the pop-up video-conference window inside the main window for the upcoming release.

The multi-part audio and video-conference feature is also one of the main feature that miss in Movim and is requested quite often by our users. Let's see if Movim 0.22 finally include this long awaited #feature.

Regarding the amount of work that need to be done regarding those features it might be possible that specific funding will be requested for it to free up enough time to work properly on their integration.

Enjoy!

A big thanks to the #Movim community that is growing more than ever. You can find us on our main support chatroom movim@conference.movim.eu.

If you find issues or if you want to contribute to the project you can find everything on our Github page.

And if you want to support us, fund the development of new features and help us pay our servers, domains and communication we are actively looking for supporters and sponsors on our Patreon.

That's all folks!

I was used to #release a new version of #Movim twice a year. Skiff is an exception. One year of work was required to release the 20th major version of the project.

The main reason is mostly based on the amount of work and adjustments required to integrate the main feature of this release: the support of end-to-end #encryption through the implementation of OMEMO.

So let's dive in all the new exciting features that you will discover in this major release.

OMEMO

The technical part was already extensively covered by the dedicated article End to end encryption in Movim - OMEMO is (finally) there!.

The user experience and flow is not very different than on other XMPP clients, if Movim detects that you can start an encrypted conversation with a contact a small lock icon will be displayed next to the chatbox. You can always choose to toggle it back to have a non-encrypted discussion.

It is also possible to see all the encryption fingerprints in the Contact drawer under the dedicated "Fingerprints" tab. You can also enable and disable encryption to each fingerprint manually there. Movim is displaying the last message sent or received and the client linked to the fingerprint to help you with your configuration. But rest assured, those settings are only for those that wants to configure in detail their encryption levels.

End-to-end encryption is also available for group chats, the flow is exactly the same as for single contacts.

There is some chances that you encounter encryption issues in some cases, even after a lot of debug and refactoring end-to-end encryption is a really complex beast that is difficult to handle. Feel free to open a ticket with all the details to reproduce the issue if you encounter one.

I'd like to thank again NLNet for their help on this project ! With the funding I was able to free-up time to finally integrate end-to-end encryption in Movim.

Posts

A few changes were made regarding the posts and their integration within Movim.

The post publication form was slightly redesigned and now allows several images, files or links to be attached. Linked to that change, post cards were also redesigned with a more compact design.

The public Communities and Blog pages now have the same 2-columns design as their private version. The displayed Communities and Contacts information are also now more compact.

The tags were redesigned and are now more clearly visible and navigable.

Chat

The contacts and chatrooms drawers were redesigned and now include some really useful information. Pictures and links sent in conversations are now quickly available in dedicated tabs.

Chat bubbles are now properly displaying quotes and support message styling.

A big refactoring was also done regarding how the edited messages are handled in Movim. This refactoring allowed messages to be edited in Group Chats and the support of several edits on a single message (which caused some weird message duplication bug).

Chatrooms

Chatrooms administrators can now manage affiliations and ban/unban users.

You can now prioritize your most important chatrooms on top of the list with the pin feature.

...and many other things

The old Movim API code was fully removed. It had been left untouched for years and not really used nor up-to-date anymore.

When you are in a chat conversation, the other chats counter is displayed on the back button.

The internal picture library was rewritten and simplified, it now supports transparent avatars. All pictures are now compressed in WebP by default.

Admins can now fully disable the registration feature. It is quite useful if you have a dedicated Movim setup and a specific separated flow to register your users (using an internal LDAP in a company or school for example).

Plenty of new emojis were integrated with the support of Unicode 13.0.

Movim is now a Progressive Web App

Movim used to have some "native" apps, on desktop and Android. All those app are now deprecated and replaced by work that was done to make Movim a full Progressive Web App. From any browsers you can now install Movim as an app on your phone or desktop in a single click.

Conclusion

Lots of other small improvements and features were integrated in this release but not listed there, it's time for you to discover them. Enjoy this new version!

That's all folks!

A new useful #feature has been merged into Movim today. It will also be part of the upcoming 0.19 #release.

This change relies on the standard XEP-0201: Best Practices for Message Threads and allows you to #reply to a chat message using any XMPP account using Movim.

You could already find such feature on other chat platforms like #Telegram or #WhatsApp, the flow is also quite similar: on supported messages, click on the reply button and a little preview will appear next to the chat box input, fill in your message, publish, et voilà !

You can also navigate to the original message by clicking on the little preview (if this message is currently shown in the conversation).

Enjoy :)

It's been six months since the last #release, and for the 0.18 – Oterma one there's a lot to show!

So let's dive in this list of exciting features and changes that you will find in this new release.

Notifications

0.18 is coming with quite some changes regarding how the notifications are handled and displayed within Movim. This also came with lots of bug fixes to ensure that the counters are up-to-date everywhere across the UI and between all the devices.

One of the first notable changes you will find is how the global chat counter is behaving. This counter is now displaying the total number of unread discussions and not the total number of unread chat messages anymore.

Related to this change, an update on the chatrooms bookmark specifications is now allowing you to save a per-chatroom notification configuration. With this new feature you'll be able to choose, for each chatroom, if you want to “always be notified” for each new messages, “only when you're mentioned”, or “never”.

Movim can now use sound to notify you of a new incoming message, if you allow it to (see the configuration panel).

Stickers, drawing and emojis

We also improved some existing chat features. Some work has been done by Christine Ho on the Draw widget. The drawn lines are now smoother, even on large resolution pictures. The feature has also been extended to allow you to draw on existing pictures you upload from your device.

Christine Ho also improved the existing emoji picker to add useful search bar, you can find it when trying to add a reaction bellow a message.

A new pack of fresh meme stickers was also added to the stickers panel.

And finally, the Movim emojis support has been updated to Unicode 12.0, bringing a pack of new emojis in.

Video conferencing

A big part of the time spent on this release was focused on the video-conference features. The related code was heavily reworked to ensure a smooth compatibility with the #Conversations Android client, it's still not perfect but works already quite well.

This was especially because of the integration of XEP-0215: External Service Discovery in the project. Allowing the web browser to easily perform STUN/TURN discovery (it's a way to discover alternative routes on the Internet for the video and audio feeds to be streamed on) using the #XMPP server services.

The call flow was also split to conveniently allow audio-only calls.

And the screen-sharing feature was integrated on the video-side. Useful when you want to quickly show a document or a presentation during your call!

Video-conferencing is hard. For this release we made quite a lot of work to improve the user experience but we are still not totally satisfied with the result. Some more work will be needed in the upcoming releases to really deliver the best we can offer for that feature.

And a many other things…

Chat and chatrooms

The interfaces between the chat and chatrooms (header bar, drawer menu) are now unified to display general information the same way. A little gallery was added which displays recently sent and received pictures.

The pictures handling in chat messages has been improved. Movim is now trying to resolve picture URLs, even if they were sent using a client that doesn't embed pictures in messages.

The scrolling behavior in chat was greatly improved and simplified, a little "go to bottom" button was also added.

Movim now handles the XEP-0319: Last User Interaction and can therefore be more precise to tell you the last time your contacts were seen active.

Post publication

Movim was already automatically saving your draft posts while you were writing, but since this version it actually displays when a draft has been saved. The post publication panel was also slightly redesigned to be clearer and more accessible.

Performance

On the technical side, a PresenceBuffer system was added to handle wave of presences coming from the network and mass insert them in the SQL DB. This reduces by a factor of 10 to 100 the number of requests that are done to the database during those "spikes" of incoming presences from the network. This little feature greatly improves logins speed and shortens the time it takes to join a new chatroom.

Favicon

The favico.js library, that was handling the little counter in the browser tab icons had been removed and rewritten using only vanilla JavaScript, keeping only the required bits which also made it way smaller. This was actually the last (external) JavaScript dependency coming with Movim.

XMPP Authentication

Regarding the authentication process, Movim now supports XEP-0368: SRV records for XMPP over TLS to directly connect to XMPP using an encrypted socket (better than the historical STARTTLS negociation system that is still used as a fallback mechanism). Regarding the IP resolution Movim now uses the Happy Eyeballs mechanism to resolve the server IP on IPv4 or IPv6.

Android application

Finally, the official Android app gained nice features thanks to the improved integration of Movim on your phone.

The notification handler has been reworked to handle newer Android versions, conversations are now stacked properly.

From any application you can now share a URL to Movim directly and publish it in a Post. In the future we are planning to add more sharing capabilities like this one (share to contacts or chatrooms for example).

Related to the video-conferencing improvements, audio and video calls are now launched in a separate task to allow you to switch back easily to your chat or publications while having your call. This makes it close to the experience you can already have on desktop.

Finally some work was done in #Movim and on the Android app to improve the general performance, especially regarding the touch features and general responsiveness.

To conclude…

As always you can test all those features on our official pod, or deploy them in a few steps on your own server :)

We always need some funding to help us promoting Movim and covering project costs, feel free to help on our Patreon.

And stay tuned for the upcoming releases, it seems that there are some interesting features already planned ;)

That's all folks!

A bit more than a month after the #Movim 0.17.1 Catalina release I'm pleased to deliver two new releases and a new tool to all the movim.eu users. Let's dive in all those new exciting features.

Movim 0.17.1

This minor #release focuses on a few things. We could call it an "integration release". In fact most of the work done were to help with the new Debian package and for the new Android app release.

Regarding the Debian package, I'd like to personally thanks Dominik George aka Natureshadow from Teckids e.V. and mirabilos for their continuous work on the dependency packaging, patches and general maintenance of the .deb. They were both added in this release on the Core Contributors page. Thanks!

Upload widget improvements

The #Upload #widget, that is used to upload files and pictures during the Posts and Messages publication has been redesigned. You can now drag and drop files from your explorer directly in the drop area. The picture visualization has also been improved and now display more information about it.

Integration with the new Movim Android release

The Movim #Android app has not been updated for a while. This new release improves the integration experience one step further.

In fact, the top bar is now transparent and integrates with the rest of the user interface. The pod switching button is not shown anymore during the startup process (that was slowing down the launch of the app) but directly in the navigation bar (you will need to upgrade both Movim and Movim Android to handle this feature). This allows Movim to launch in only a few seconds on a standard 4G connection.

On the Chat page, it is now possible to close the conversations using a simple drag-to-left movement. Similar to what you can find on Telegram for example.

Movim Account Panel

Last but not least, all the movim.eu #XMPP accounts have now access to a new panel. Available on api.movim.eu/accounts it allows some account wise configuration to complete some features unavailable client side.

To authenticate a "one click link" mechanism has been added. Once your identifier entered this authentication link will be send directly by chat allowing you to access your Account Panel.

Through this panel you'll be able to list all the existing files you ever uploaded using your XMPP account, in the future you'll be able to also delete them.

Email to XMPP

This Panel also contains an exclusive feature, the possibility to receive #emails on your XMPP account.

This feature is only working one way, in fact it's our mascot, and now postwoman Miho that will take care of delivering the emails as chat messages directly to you. Please notice that the attachments are not forwarded and we are not applying any form of SPAM filtering on them. The emails are transferred as it in their textual version to you.

That's all folks! And don't forget, to prevent the spread of the #COVID19, stays safe at home!

Here comes a new exciting Movim release. Two months after Cesco, here comes Catalina.

In this releases, many fixes but also some nice new features, both for the social and messaging sections of Movim.

New features

Global chatroom search

From the chatrooms widget, you can now directly search rooms globaly and join them in a click. This new feature relies on the search.jabber.network service, that is also implemented in Conversations and Gajim.

New design for the XMPP forms

The XMPP forms handling and display has been fully redesigned. With nice icons and proper labels it will now be simpler to configure Communities, chatrooms and other XMPP items.

Disable social features

Pod admins can now disable all the social features in one click in the admin panel. This is useful for those that only wants to use Movim as a chat frontend for their XMPP services.

Messages retractation

After ConverseJS Movim is the second XMPP client that implements the message retractation feature. This allow you to delete any published messages from the history. Be careful, this only works if the contact is also using a compatible client.

New night theme colors and design adjustments

Some small design adjustments were made to improve user experience. Some useless paddings were also removed to give more space to the content (like around the chat bubbles).

The night theme is now having darker, bluer colors, strongly inspired by the Aritim-Dark KDE/GTK theme.

Fixes and improvements

Beside those changes, many things were fixed in this release, regarding chatroom presences handling, notification counters or complex JID handling (especially if you're using transport services such as IRC or Telegram).

But the biggest internal change was to bring a new request type to the frontend. Now the current Movim UI (HTML + Javascript + CSS) can request the backend in 3 different ways regarding the usage.

1. Pure WebSocket requests: the request and the response are not linked together. This is the default case for the Movim requests.
2. Ajax requests to the daemon: this is useful when the UI needs to know if the message was handled by the server (useful when you publish articles or send chat messages) and if those messages needs to be processed by the daemon (to trigger XMPP requests for example)
3. And, since this version, some good ol' pure Ajax requests. They directly requests the HTTP backend, without even touching the daemon internaly. This is useful to load pieces of the UI and allows parallelisation. With this changes you'll see that parts of the UI (especially on the chat page) are now loaded way faster, without disturbing the daemon.

What's next?

In the upcoming weeks we're planning to do some maintenance on the XMPP services. Add some new features and do some administration. On Movim side, nothing really planned for now.

That's all folks!

#movim #ajax #http #release #xmpp

Only a few weeks after the 0.16 release here is the 0.16.1 one!

This release includes several fixes and a few new features.

Features

You can now share posts to your connected chatrooms :)

Communities layout were a bit redesigned, publication rules are now displayed clearly in the right column and the header shows more information on mobile.

All the messages that you sent in the one to one discussions can now be edited.

The videoconferencing feature was heavily refactored and several issues were fixed during this process. A new XEP was also used partially to improve the call negociation flow, XEP-0353: Jingle Message Initiation.

Fixes

In the database an index was added on the key that was tracking contacts avatars. This sounds maybe a bit technical to you but this small fix boost quite a lot the performances during the login process, when you join a chatroom (especially that one) or when a contact updates his/her avatar. Because it's a database change you should run the database migrations when updating from 0.16 to 0.16.1.

All the entities that are on the XMPP network needs to declare what they are capable of to the others. This allows feature discovery and negociation and is specified in the #XMPP extension XEP-0115: Entity Capabilities. After the big code refactor of the handling of those #capabilities within the Movim codebase some other small improvements and fixes were done to wrap up properly this feature.

Presences sent to MUC are now generated the same way than those sent to contacts, this fixes #711.

DNS resolution errors an timeout are now handled properly displayed during the authentication flow (#368).

The SQL_DATE constant was renamed to MOVIM_SQL_DATE to prevent some naming conflicts (#820).

What's next?

PHP 7.4 was released a few days ago, so the upcoming version will focus on fixing issues to make Movim fully compatible with that version.

This new PHP release also includes an exciting feature that allows #PHP developpers to call directly C libraries in their codes. This could allow #Movim to directly use the libsignal C library and therefore (finally) allow OMEMO end-to-end-encryption to be implemented. This will be a lot of work and verifications so we're not promissing anything anytime soon. Stay calm please!

That's all folks!

#omemo #videoconference #jingle #release