From 4.1 to 4.2

Stash replaced with Phpfastcache

The internal caching library Stash has been replaced with Phpfastcache. Phpfastcache is better maintained, provides more cachedrivers and adds more features to the cache implementation. This change should cause no issues on any existing installation. If you have Memcache or Redis configured in your elgg-config/settings.php you might need to update your configuration.

Metadata and Annotation boolean values

The database model has been changed to keep boolean values intact between saving and retrieving. Before this change if you saved a boolean value it would be returned as an integer. Now it will remain a boolean.

Warning

If you saved boolean values previously they will still be integers in the database (until saved again).

System message functions

The functions system_message() and register_error() have been replaced by elgg_register_success_message() and elgg_register_error_message(). The new functions have the ability to pass extra options to the system messages registry.

Javascript functions

The Elgg javascript libraries have gotten a massive overhaul. A lot of functions have been deprecated. You can find all deprecated functions and globals in views/default/core/js/deprecated.js.

System messages

If you use system messages in your javascript, you now should require the elgg/system_messages module.

Security tokens

If you use elgg.security.addToken() in your javascript, you now should require the elgg/security module.

Translations

If you use elgg.echo() in your javascript, you now should require the elgg/i18n module.

UI functions

The user hover menu is no longer initialized from the global ui.js, but requires the javascript on demand from the icon/user/default view.

ElggUser & ElggEntity

The javascript equivalent of the ElggUser and ElggEntity should no longer be used. The logged in user entity should no longer be referenced in the elgg.session.user page data. You can find its attributes in elgg.user as an array.

Security

output/url now has added security features to help prevent malicious user generated output. The view supports $vars['allowed_schemes'] which contains a list of allowed URL schemes. The provided $vars['href'] will be matched against the allowed list. If the URL doesn’t have an allowed scheme the URL will be prefixed with denied:.

This will help to prevent user input like javascript:alert('just testing'); from being presented to the users.

By default the following schemes are allowed: http, https, ftp, sftp, ssh, file

If you use the pattern elgg_view('output/url', ['text' => 'something', 'href' => 'javascript:void(0);']) update your code to set href to false.

Groups

The menu name for the tabs on the group members page has been replaced to use the default filter menu logic. Rewrite your plugin hooks from menu:groups_members to menu:filter:groups/members. Since this is a different menu the current group entity is now available in the hook parameter filter_entity.

Deprecated APIs

Lib functions

  • elgg_view_menu_item() use elgg_view('navigation/menu/elements/item/url', ['item' => $myMenuItem])
  • register_error() use elgg_register_error_message()
  • system_message() use elgg_register_success_message()