[ZendTo] ANNOUNCE: New 4.23 beta released

[Jules]

Folks,

With help from several of you kind people, I have added all sorts of 
cool new things to ZendTo:

1. HTML emails as well as plain text ones.
2. Simpler email configuration, allowing for easy setup of 
authentication and TLS encryption.
3. Upload progress bar reimplemented to run entirely on the web browser. 
It no longer needs that pesky APC/APCu php module, so it now works well 
on PHP 7 and hence Ubuntu 16. It updates itself more frequently too, so 
looks better.

There are several new settings in preferences.php and a couple near the 
top of zendto.conf.
I strongly recommend you use my upgrade_preferences_php tool to sort out 
preferences.php for you.

I have released a new beta of the Installer that will install the latest 
beta, rather than the production releases.
The beta installer has all the necessary changes for the new beta 
features above.

1. HTML emails — If you want to just have plain text emails, that's 
fine. If the *_email_html.tpl template files don't exist, it will send 
plain text emails. But the HTML emails are properly MIME structured, 
with embedded images & CSS so that they display perfectly even when the 
recipients have told their email apps not to display remote content. So 
you might want to try them. (Go on....)

2. Mail config — The new email code with easy TLS and SMTP AUTH uses 
PHPMailer. However, if you leave your 'SMTPserver' (in preferences.php) 
set to '' then it will revert to the old code that relies on an 
underlying sendmail/Postfix setup. Note that the old code can only send 
plain text emails, it will never attempt to send HTML emails.

3. Upload bar — This even appears to work on IE11 on Windows 7. Please 
do report any browser issues. I have used jQuery in an attempt to 
minimise cross-browser problems.

I have fixed all reported bugs.
So if you have reported a problem, please do try this release and let me 
know if it's fixed or not.

See http://zend.to/beta.php for the latest download links.

Let me know what you think!

The Change Log is:

- This version includes several new settings in preferences.php.
   I strongly recommend the use of
   /opt/zendto/sbin/upgrade_preferences_php
   to automatically upgrade your existing file.
   Run it without any arguments and it shows you how to use it.
- There are changes to zendto.conf for the HTML email templates.
- Added PHPMailer to enable HTML email, TLS encryption and SMTP auth.
   NOTE: its use is entirely optional, and disabled by default
   (so the old email code will be used instead).
   Note: the HTML email templates (/opt/zendto/templates/*_email_html.tpl)
   are optional. If they don't exist, it will continue to send only plain-
   text emails.
   Read the docs in preferences.php just above the 'SMTPserver' setting
   for more information and tips.
- Wrote HTML versions of all the email templates for you to start from.
   For simplest deployment, copy www/images/email-logo.png and replace it
   with your organization's logo of the same height. For more details,
   see the templates. They all have "email" and "html" in their name.
- Progress bar now works better on 64-bit browsers. Does not require
   APC or APCu modules. Works fine on Ubuntu 16 and PHP 7.
   Many thanks to Milan Babel for showing me how to do this!
- Installer updated to not build APC/APCu module.
- Installer updated to configure PHPMailer instead of sendmail/postfix.
- Upgraded to very latest version of Smarty template engine 3.1.
- Fixed bug in cron job that sent out reminders containing broken links.
   NOTE: There is a new setting in preferences.php called 'serverRoot'.
   This is the root URL of your ZendTo website, and must end with a '/'.
- Reminder emails for about-to-expire drop-offs are now noticeably
   different. (There is a slight template change to dropoff_email.tpl)
- Broken links on "security" page fixed.
- Bug fixed where logout didn't, on combination of Ubuntu 16 and Chrome.
- Bug fixed where pickup notification email could refer to invalid
   email address in very rare circumstances.
- Installer now copes with EPEL repo pre-installed but disabled.
- adduser.php now corrects SQLite database file ownership back to that
   of the web server, in case you ran it before rendering the home page
   to get the web server to create it with the right permissions.

Jules

-- 
Julian Field MEng CEng CITP MBCS MIEEE MACM

'Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign
  thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of
  human intellectual tradition.' - Stephen Jay Gould

www.Zend.To
Twitter: @JulesFM
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