[horde] New releases coming today - Read before update

[Ralf Lang]

Dear Horde community,

I am pleased to announce an upcoming round of releases later today.

JWT Authentication - Basic support

Horde/Core and Horde/Base now contain infrastructure for JWT based
authentication. You don't strictly need to update your configuration right
now. In principle JWT authentication works without sessions but most of
horde currently needs sessions even for unauthenticated guest screens.
Little by little we are going to change that. As a rule of thumb, anything
which needs your username (as you type on login, not as you see after
login) and password will continue to require a session. This is especially
true for mail and LDAP. Anything which just needs to know who you are and
if horde thinks you properly logged in does NOT require a session and can
gradually migrate to using the JWT solution. This will reduce database
traffic quite a bit on busy sites, but we mostly developed it as a way to
open Horde to modern APIs and enterprise authentication flows.

New Login Page

If your Horde installation supports "pretty" urls in its conf.php, the
Horde Login and Horde Mobile Portal will look somewhat different than you
are used to. I hope you like the new look. It has been optimized to work
across all screen sizes and device types (mobile/tablet/tiled desktop/full
desktop). Please give feedback if you see any accessibility issues with the
new Login (visually impaired, hard to read on certain scenarios, does not
support what you did previously...  Also react if coupling this to the
pretty URL breaks something for you or if you integrate with some external
login site and the new behaviour causes you any trouble.

New Mobile Portal

This is in fact a bold lie. Horde Base never really had a mobile portal but
it had a simple list of apps in mobile mode and called that its equivalent
to the desktop Portal page /horde/services/portal.php - The new page is
currently a functional equivalent but in a modern style. I hope you like
the style and it works on your mobile. Please give feedback if this causes
any issues for you. We actually want to convert all mobile view to the new
style and technical basis. The current "smartmobile" view is based on an
outdated technology Jquery Mobile which is no longer actively maintained.
We need to get off that and at the same time renovate the whole thing so it
was time for a hard break.


This is part of a larger strategy: The mobile technical basis will
gradually enhanced for tablets and ultimately for desktop screens with
feature parity to our existing desktop apps. We cannot convert the existing
desktop views in one go so instead we will gradually build something which
is as good or better. Some day you will see a switch if you like old mode
or new mode for each app's desktop.

Improved test.php debugging screen

Under horde/test.php you always had a small debug helper screen which would
tell you what is wrong with your horde setup if you don't get it to run. We
have slightly updated its look & feel but more importantly we have added
new insights to this screen. This will probably see more probes in the next
iterations. We have only just begun.

New color schemes

For the first time in a while we are shipping a "red" and a "dark" theme
along with the horde default theme. These are simple colour swaps as proof
of concept for the new mobile screens. Nothing spectacular and maybe not
even beautiful. We also have a "material ui" inspired theme which needs
installation as a composer package but it is somewhat lacking and would
benefit from half an hour from somebody who actually does frontend
professionally. ;) Help welcome

Bug Fixes

Torben and Dmitry have worked with the community to provide some bug fixes
in ActiveSync, postgresql support and Forms generation. I hope the tool kit
changes will help me give you more regular and more specific status updates
soon.

Should I update now?

If you run a test/staging setup then by all means yes, try it as soon as we
release the packages this afternoon/evening and report all issues. Your
production site should probably wait a week or two.

Regards

Ralf & Team