Only a few months after #Movim 0.24 here comes Movim 0.25 Nagata!

Let's have a look at all the new features and fixes that you can find in this exciting #release.

What's new?

Message files refactoring

The attached #message files metadata are now moved to the Movim SQL database, this allows way more flexibility to handle then including the upcoming work on the multi-files per message feature.

Along this change comes the support of thumbhash. The general idea is to build a small blurred version of the image that can be transferred and store inside the message metadata and then render it as a placeholder for the image before it gets downloaded.

Internal file upload proxy, bye bye CORS!

When you upload a file on Movim, it is not store in Movim itself but directly on your #XMPP server File Upload Service.

This feature, defined in XEP-0363: HTTP File Upload is pretty useful and widely implemented in the XMPP ecosystem. However XMPP web clients, such as Movim, have to deal with browser related limitations called #CORS (Cross-origin resource sharing) that needs some more configuration on the XMPP servers to allow upload files from domains that are not the same as the XMPP file #upload service one.

This new version comes with an internal file upload proxy, basically your file is first uploaded to a temporary script in Movim that then take care to upload it to your XMPP File Upload Service. This change makes all those configuration obsolete and greatly simplify the Movim deployment and configuration.

One small detail, please ensure that your PHP upload_max_filesize internal setting is large enough to handle the files that will be uploaded to the XMPP servers, somes are allowing up to a few hundreds megabytes for the maximum file sizes.

Automatic Nightmode 🌙

Movim is having a Nightmode toggle for a while already. A few internal changes is now allowing Movim to just follow your browser or operating system directives.

XEP-0410: MUC Self-Ping (Schrödinger's Chat)

As defined in the introduction of the XEP:

The Multi-User Chat (XEP-0045) [1] protocol was not designed to handle s2s interruptions or message loss well. Rather often, the restart of a server or a component causes a client to believe that it is still joined to a given chatroom, while the chatroom service does not know of this occupant.

Movim is now implementing the basic features of this XMPP extension and therefore automatically disconnect your from a chatroom if no activity was detected for a few minutes and if the ping doesn't come back positively. It was reported in the issue 1164.

Various other fixes

This version also fixes a few issues like a bug that prevented sometimes Movim to resynchronize the conversations history for one-to-one discussions, a SRV record certificate validation misconfiguration or a wrong priority of the XEP-0319: Last User Interaction over the XEP-0203: Delayed Delivery presences that were giving wrong information regarding your contact "last activity".

What's next?

This release should be the last one before some exciting huge set of features, with the support of the NLNet Fundation that will be integrated in Movim in the upcoming months. It seems that it should improve a few things regarding audio and video calls, stay tuned! 👀

Hope that you'll enjoy all those changes 😊

That's all folks!

A few days after the 0.24 announcement we are releasing a 0.24.1 that fixes a few small things.

bcrypt passwords and null characters

Movim was using the null character (\0) to concatenate some strings to create a hash. Some recent minor PHP #release forbid the presence of such character for this usage in #bcrypt.

This was documented and fixed in the ticket #1311.

Small interface fixes

An error in the Notification tab was preventing users to read the content of the comments that were done under their publications, a placeholder image was added to the Send To drawer if no Communities are currently subscribed and some small CSS padding were fixed to make the interface more consistent.

Enjoy !

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

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!