Release announcements

Zulip 1.8.1 bug fix release

Tim Abbott • 3 min read

Today we’re releasing Zulip Server 1.8.1. This is a bug fix release, containing a few dozen cherry-picked changes since 1.8.0.

What’s new

The highlights of this release are primarily for folks installing a new Zulip server: a tool for automatically registering for push notifications, and a bunch of bug fixes to the Slack import tool introduced in Zulip 1.8.0.

This release contains the following changes:

  • Added an automated tool (manage.py register_server) to sign up for the mobile push notifications service.
  • Improved rendering of block quotes in mobile push notifications.
  • Improved some installer error messages.
  • Fixed several minor bugs with the new Slack import feature.
  • Fixed several visual bugs with the new compose input pills.
  • Fixed several minor visual bugs with night mode.
  • Fixed bug with visual clipping of “g” in the left sidebar.
  • Fixed an issue with the LDAP backend users’ Organization Unit (OU) being cached, resulting in trouble logging in after a user was moved between OUs.
  • Fixed a couple subtle bugs in topic muting corner cases.

Upgrading

We recommend upgrading to this latest release to get these bug fixes. See the upgrade instructions in the Zulip documentation.

If you’re upgrading from 1.8.0, then the code changes are small and there are no migrations or dependency changes, so the risk of unexpected disruption is low.

If you’ve previously registered for the Mobile Push Notification Service via the old email workflow, you can now use manage.py register_server --rotate-key to rotate the key your server uses to authenticate itself to the Mobile Push Notification Service. Or if you haven’t, you can take the opportunity to try the new automated registration workflow.

If you need help, best-effort support is available on chat.zulip.org, the Zulip community chat server.

Community

We love feedback from the Zulip user community. Here are a few ways you can connect:

PyCon 2018

We’ll be at PyCon this week; if you’ll be there, come say hi! There are a few opportunities:

  • We have a booth in the Open Source Alley during the trade show.
  • Greg Price is giving a talk on Python static types and our experiences as the first big project to fully adopt them.
  • We’ll be there for all 4 days of the community sprints next week. While the conference itself is sold out, the sprints are free and you can just show up, so if you’re near Cleveland, Ohio and have been looking for a chance to get involved in contributing to Zulip, come join us!

-Tim Abbott