Release Candidate 1 for Revive Adserver v5.4.0

[Revive Adserver Forum]

The Revive Adserver project team is proud to announce that a Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is now available for the upcoming Revive Adserver v5.4.0.

Introducing Revive Adserver v5.4.0

The new version 5.4.0 wil support PHP 8.1.x, and it introduces a number of improvements and changes to how Revive Adserver handles user passwords. There are also a number of smaller improvements and bug fixes.

In order to give users of the Revive Adserver software the opportunity to thoroughly test this new version, we’ve put together this release candidate.

Summary of changes in Revive Adserver v5.4.0

We’ve implemented significant improvements to the way Revive Adserver handles end-user passwords:

• Bcrypt is now used to store password hashes, replacing md5.
• The password of the admin user is automatically re-hashed while performing the update to v5.4.0.
• All other users users will be sent an email upon login, asking them to enter a new password.
• The minimum password length is now set to 12 characters. This default length can be changed in the configuration file.
• We’ve added a welcome email for new users, to prompt them to set up their own password.
• We’ve added a password strength indicator during installation and password set up / recovery, based on MIT licensed Dropbox’s zxcvbn library.
• We’ve added autocomplete attributes for username and password fields, for example to help password managers more easily recognize user credentials and suggest strong passwords.

For more info about these changes, please refer to the page at https://www.revive-adserver.com/faq/passwords-in-v5-4-0/

There are also a number of other changes and improvements in this release:

• We’ve added support for PHP 8.1.
• We’ve added support for WEBP format in image and HTML5 banners.
• Website invocation code generation now uses async tags.
• Asynchronous tag now sends a custom “revive-<ID>-loaded” JS event when loading each banner and a “revive-<ID>-completed” event when all  the positions on the page have been filled. This allows interaction and customization, e.g. dynamically adding a class to all image banners.
• Tags are now generated using https by default, with the possibility to use plain http instead in the invocation code screens.
• We’ve added banner delivery setting to configure the “rel” HTML attribute for the click tracking links of image and text banners, defaulting to “noopener nofollow”. The setting is also exposed in the newly added “{rel}” magic macro.
• We’ve added a new maintenance screen to resend invitation emails to new users and password reset emails to users requiring the update to the new bcrypt password hash system.
• We’ve added missing linkUserToAdvertiserAccount, linkUserToTraffickerAccount and linkUserToManagerAccount methods to the v2 XML-RPC Api client library and fixed bugs related to (re)setting permissions through them.

This version also fixes a number of bugs and has one security improvement:

• We’ve fixed a prioritization issue when setting the “to_be_delivered” flag introduced in 5.3.0.
• We’ve fixed an issue parsing and modifying “var clickTag = ”;” in HTML5 banners when there is no whitespace around the equal sign.
• We’ve fixed an issue allowing the installation to proceed when entering two non matching admin passwords, as long as the “Repeat password” field was not empty.
• Password recovery e-mails were sent using the user name rather than the contact name in the To: header, this has been fixed.
• Password recovery landing screen is no longer English-only, instead it loads the user’s defined language instead.

The full release notes are available on the project’s Github pages.

Staging Only!

Today’s RC1 should not be used in a production environment. We would like to invite system administrators and developers to install it in a staging environment, or to make a copy of their production environment and update that copy to this new version.

If you’d like to do a fresh install of this release candidate, please see the instructions for installing Revive Adserver on the website. A detailed process for updating the Revive Adserver software can be found on the website as well.

Update path of Revive Adserver and PHP

Any versions of Revive Adserver prior to v5.3.0 will not run with PHP8, whereas Revive Adserver v5.4.0 won’t run on PHP versions prior to 7.2.5.

Please note that Revive Adserver v5.4.0 does not yet run on PHP 8.2. Support for that upcoming release of PHP will be part of a future release of Revive Adserver.

If all else fails, you might consider following this update path:

• Update Revive Adserver to version 5.2.1 if still using an older version
• Update the server to PHP version 7.2.5 or higher, but not PHP 8
• Update Revive Adserver to version 5.4.0-RC1
• Update the server to PHP version 8.0.x or even PHP version 8.1.x.

Technical requirements for PHP 8 can be found on the php.net website.

Updating MySQL

It is recommended to update MySQL to v8 only after a successful update of Revive Adserver to v5.3.0 or higher.

Download now!

Release Candidate 1 of Revive Adserver v5.4.0 can be downloaded now from the Downloads page of the website.

Reporting issues

Any issues or bugs found during the installation, update, or use of the v5.3.0 RC1 should be reported only by creating a new issue in our Github repository. However, before doing so, please check to see if the issue you noticed has already been reported, and consider adding a comment about any additional observations to the issue instead. The issue you observed may have already been fixed.

Please try to be as specific as possible, including any error log entries you might be able to provide, and/or screenshots of the issue. Describe what you were trying to do, what you expected to happen, and what actually happened instead. Make sure to mask any sensitive details like usernames, passwords, paths and URLs.

Timeline for final release of v5.4.0

Our current plan is to have a final release of v5.4.0 available on April 14, 2022. However, this may have to be delayed due to pending issues at that time.

You can follow our progress towards completing the v5.4.0 release on our Github page.

Community contributions

The continued development of Revive Adserver is being sponsored by community members, either financially or in the form of code contributions. We’re very grateful for the support we’ve received. If you would like to contribute to our project financially, please consider becoming a patron on Patreon.com.

Another way to contribute to our project, is by using the Revive Adserver Hosted edition.

The post Release Candidate 1 for Revive Adserver v5.4.0 appeared first on Revive Adserver.

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