Today the ownCloud community releases ownCloud 8.2. 8.2 sounds like a small improvement compared to 8.1 that was released in July. But 8.2 is major release with a ton of improvements which makes this release one of the most important so far. Main new features are:
Next generation Web UI
The web interface of ownCloud was improved in a lot of significant areas. The overall design is way more modern with a lighter font, lighter colors and less visual clutter. We also introduced new UI elements like a new right sidebar and a new actions menu. The sharing dialog, versioning, activities and details with bigger thumbnails are now available in the new sidebar. We also improved compatibility with IE and mobile browsers.
New Gallery
The old Photo Gallery app was replaced with a new Gallery app (Gallery+) that is more modern, faster, stable and has cool new features. The new gallery was developed independently by the community for a while and now replaces the old one in the official release.
Notification framework
8.2 ships with a new notification system that will show interactive and non interactive notification to users in the web interface and desktop and mobile clients once apps start using the new API. These notifications are available in parallel to the activity stream.
VM
ownCloud is now also available as an officially supported virtual machine image that is compatible with VMWare, VirtualBox and other virtualization software. This makes it super easy to run an ownCloud server without a ton of Linux server knowledge. This VM also includes the new ownCloud Proxy app which makes it super easy to make a locally running ownCloud VM accessible from the internet. This is done in collaboration with the awesome open source project PageKite.
Other improvements
- Improved text editor
- A command line tool to encrypt or decrypt all files
- Fine control over the automatic trash and versioning cleanup jobs
- Improved way to implement external storage backends
- A ton of refactoring, architecture improvements and code cleanup has happend all over the place.
- Our unit test coverage of core reached now 60%
Additionally a TON of bugfixes, performance improvements and smaller features went into this version of ownCloud which makes it a very nice and well rounded release. Overall more then 512 issues in core alone where closed for 8.2 and over 750 pull requests where merged.
More information and screenshots can be found on the official 8.2 feature page here: https://owncloud.org/eight-two
It is also important to note that some features like the new sidebar or the new external storage API will be the foundation of bigger new improvements that are planed for ownCloud 9 which is scheduled to be realeased early next year.
I’m super happy to report that more contributors then ever before have contributed to this ownCloud release. Our community metrics from Bitergia show a nice and steady grow of contributions. http://projects.bitergia.com/ownCloud/browser/
ownCloud contains code contributions from over 850 people now. Additionally we got a lot more contributions in Translations, Testing, Packaging, Marketing, Promotion, Design and other important areas that are not included in this numbers.
But we can always use more help! Get involved on owncloud.org/contribute
Thanks a lot to everyone who is part of this great community.
Grab 8.2 now here: https://owncloud.org/install/