Movim 0.23, codename Kojima is finally out.

This version brings a lot of fixes, refactoring and a few new exciting features, lets have a look!

What's new?

Improved message bubbles and navigation

A big refactoring of the chat message bubbles internal structure and display was done. This fixes a few old issues regarding the dates separation and their status (received, read, encrypted..).

The messages statuses are now also displayed for the non-textual messages (pictures and audio) and the message menu can be triggered when previewing its attached picture.

XEP-0191: Blocking Command

Movim had its own internal system to allow its users to block specific accounts. While keeping exactly the same flows and behaviors the blocked list is now relying on the XEP-0191 that allows to synchronize on the XMPP account level. The incoming messages are also now directly blocked on the XMPP server and not in Movim anymore.

Messages history retrieval via MAM

Message Archive Management, or MAM is one of the core XMPP XEP that allows clients to retrieve and manage messages from the XMPP server archives.

Movim had a quite basic implementation of MAM until now, the 0.23 allows users to scroll-back any discussions (one to one and chatrooms) and progressively retrieve the complete chat history. The messages are then cached in the Movim database to ensure good performances.

UI improvements and other small features

Kojima is bringing a complete new pack of icons and a few related UI changes to integrate them properly during the navigation and in some specific user flows.

The Tenor integration was fixed and upgraded to the v2.0 of their API allow you to send and receive again funny GIFs while chatting!

On the other hand the Twitter integration was completely dropped regarding their recent political changes and API limitation. Bye bye Elon!

Progressive Web App integration

As you may have noticed, Movim is a Progressive Web App! This means that you don't need a specific store to get it, you can can directly install it from you prefered browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari..) and your operating system will take care of building a "native" application out of it.

A few small improvement were added in the 0.23 allowing an even better integration. Movim is now aware of your system network connectivity and automatically disconnect and reconnect/refresh when you get back online, very practical when you're using it on your phone is an area where the network is not that great.

What's next?

This version is a stepping stone before jumping into the big project that will occupy me the whole rest of the year.

The next version(s) will bring a complete refactoring and redesign of the audio-video calls as well as the suport of multi-participants calls. I will work closely with a few other XMPP clients and server teams to ensure that the integration is properly standardized and fully compatible.

I'll give you some more information about that soon.

In the meantime, enjoy the new release!

That's all folks :)

Hi everyone!

I'm happy to announce that #Movim 0.22.3 has been released. In this small #release, among some bug fixes you will find:

XEP-0425: Message Moderation

Movim is now supporting message moderation in chatrooms. This will allow admins to moderate bad messages in a few clicks.

Movim is also now handling moderated and removed messages coming from bridged accounts. Deleted messages on Telegram bridged using Slidge will be properly handled and removed in Movim accordingly.

Improved avatars

Some small cleanup were done regarding avatar display. Newly uploaded avatars are now 512x512px !

Fixes fixes fixes

A dumb mistake, that was preventing likes and comments to be published under articles has been fixed as well as a Docker related issue that was preventing to serve some files properly.

Enjoy!

Hi everyone!

Another small bugfix #release. Lets have a look!

New design for the navigation bars

This version introduce a new design for the navigation bars, both on desktop and mobile. Nothing big but it should gives some more feedback when navigating between the different Movim zones.

Avatars refresh fixes

Several bugs around the avatars refresh were also fixed. #Movim now properly check if the #avatar is not already in cache before trying to refresh it again.

The avatar refresh queries are also now spread in time using a super simple scheduler. This helps lowering the network (and I/O) load when logging in.

Some avatars placeholders were also not displayed in some chatrooms, this version fix this small issue.

Chatroom administration panel

The previous version introduced a refactor that broke the #chatroom administration panel access. Its now fixed ☺️

join.movim.eu fixes

Not directly related with this release, but join.movim.eu was also updated to support the newest Movim versions. If you are a server admin, do not hesitate to register your instance there ☺️

That's all folks!

A small #release but with a couple of performances improvements and bug fixes.

Confidentiality settings 🔒

The configuration page was reorganized and all the confidentiality setting are now grouped in one unique section.

Linked to that, if you choose to keep your profile private, Movim is now completely disabling your public page, blog and links to your profile.

Fixes

RatchetPHP

Movim is relying on Ratchet to manage its Websockets. We moved to the fork maintained by Plesk that upgrated and is now maintaining the project. See the related ticket. This upgrade fixes the related code Warnings under PHP 8.2 as well.

Bookmarks 2 🔖

0.22 brought a refactor of the internal XMPP Pubsub related code. This change broke the #Bookmarks management. This version fixes it.

Video-conferencing fixes 📹

Movim has now some basic support of MSID in SDP (what does it means ?). This basically fixes video-conferencing between #Movim and Conversations.

Performances improvements 🚀

Maybe one of the most noticeable changes of this release are the two database related fixes that are bringing important #performances boosts (under certain conditions):

• Some large chatrooms, with plenty of messages, were taking many seconds to load. This was caused by Movim trying to find the current room subject in the #database before displaying the room panel. The related query was rewritten to reduce considerably its execution time.
• The unread messages counter database query, that was known to be one of the slowest part of Movim, was also rewritten to divide by 2 its execution time. On top of that a new index was added to boost even more its performances. This should greatly improve the chat conversations and page load time on large accounts.

And finally, some pictures, avatars and icons are now loaded lazily. This means that your phone or browser will not load them before they are actively displayed on your screen. This greatly reduce the server load and page display time.

Enjoy

Only a few months after Movim 0.21 - Whipple we are releasing Movim 0.22, codename Kowal.

This version was more focused on stabilization, cleanup and refactoring but also introduces a couple of new exciting features. It requires PHP8.1+ to work properly.

Let's dive in!

Blog privacy toggle

Already introduced in a previous blog post this new feature allow you to change your blog privacy level between "public" and "subscribers only".

Global OMEMO toggle

After some feedback from the community a global #OMEMO toggle was introduced in the settings. OMEMO is therefore disabled by default from this version.

This decision is especially linked with the current encryption implementation that relies on libsignal-protocol-javascript that is deprecated by their authors. The performances of this library are not that great, especially on mobile devices, which caused lots of accessibility issues for some Movim newcomers.

For now, no serious alternative are available, if you know one do not hesitate to tell us about it.

Fixes and improvement around audio-video calls

Several small tickets (#1212, #1213, #1214) linked to the the audio-video call integration and compatibility with other clients were fixed.

Missed and refused call events are also now tracked properly and displayed in your contacts conversations.

Cleaner URLs

The ? was (finally) removed in front of all the URLs! While being way cleaner it also fixes some issues when #Movim URLs were shared around, especially on some other social-networks. Don't worry about retro-compatibility, existing URLs are redirected to the new format.

Rewrite of the XEP-0077: In-Band Registration related code

Movim is supporting XEP-0077 for close than 10 years now and this code was never really refactored since then. All the #XMPP code, and related user flow, were cleaned and upgraded to the latest Movim standard, fixing a few issues in the meantime!

New Chat bubble design and interaction

Kowal introduce a totally new way of interacting with the chat bubbles.

While keeping the small actions icons on desktop it is now possible to simply click (or tap) on the bubbles to open a sub-menu which presents all the actions available.

This menu allows you to react, retract, reply and copy the message content in one click/tap. Easy!

Under the hood... or not

An important refactoring was done to simplify and factorize redundant items in the UI. This brought some big code cleanup, both on the front part (what is taking care of what you see) of Movim but also in the core and XMPP layers. The code was modernized and ported to PHP8.1+ in many places as well.

Several Pubsub related issues were fixed improving the compatibility with existing XMPP servers such as Prosody or ejabberd (see the related ticket). Movim now detect Pubsub nodes misconfiguration and reconfigure them properly to respect the privacy and settings specified in all the Pubsub related implemented XEPs that it supports.

This refactoring also brought some small UI improvements such as a new design for the contact status bubbles and a totally new way to handle Contacts and Communities avatars. We are strongly advising you to configure the Picture Proxy Cache on your Web Server when upgrading to greatly improve the page load time.

Two important security fixes

CVE-2023-2848 fixes a security issues that allows under certain circumstances to open a #Websocket to Movim from a different domain. It was fixed in this commit.

CVE-2023-2849 is not directly linked with Movim itself but the related server configuration.

When the domain that host upload files is the same as where Movim is hosted it is possible to upload a malicious Javascript file and execute it in the Movim sandbox. The attack surface is really minimal but we advise you to ensure that such case cannot happen on your instance. To do so you can use different domains between the two services or force the browser to handle all the uploaded files as attachments and not inline elements using a simple HTTP header:

    add_header Content-Disposition attachment;

What's next?

The multi-part audio and video-conference feature that was planned for the 0.22 is pushed back to the 0.23. The amount of work planned for that is quite big, therefore it was more relevant to move all the code cleanup and refactoring plans in Kowal and have this milestone before jumping into this new exciting feature set !

As always, if you find issues or want to share some feedback you have on the project, you can find how to contact us on our official website and our Github.

That's all folks!

Thanks to the awesome work of two Movim contributors kawaii and kskarthik there is a new Github action that automatically build the image and publish it on Docker Hub allowing you to deploy the latest Movim release on your server 😎

Checkout our DockerHub page to get your image!

#docker #dockerhub #movim #container

It is now possible to change your #Movim #blog privacy level using a new setting in the Configuration page.

All the Movim blogs used to be restricted to the users following them, now you can give access to your content to everyone visiting it 🥳

You can also know if a blog is restricted or not by visiting it.

Enjoy this new #feature !

A few days after the official 0.21, we are releasing a 0.21.1 containing a few small fixes.

This version fixes an Opcache related issue that was creating trouble with PHP 8.1, see #1183 for more information.

Movim only load the only required PDO database driver configured in the .env configuration file (see #1193).

And finally a few elements were added in the ?infos page to complete the #integration with join.movim.eu. To add your instance on the website you will need to have, at least, this version of #Movim.

That's all folks !

We are happy to introduce Join Movim 🥳

Discover and explore all the existing public Movim servers and add yours to expand even more the federated network 🌍 !

An up-to-date Movim instance is required if you want to add yours to the list. The registration process is quite straightforward. The servers list is refreshed each hour.

#Movim #XMPP #federation #join