We have now passed the code freeze for v5.4.0. It has been in development for long time, and has nearly 100 changes. We’ve never attempted a release this ambitious.
The first thing is to express my heartfelt thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release. The GitHub contributors are listed in the release note, but there are many, many others in the community who have provided feedback and bug reports that have shaped this release.
You can try it out here:
https://tiddlywiki.com/prerelease
Because of the large number of changes, we’ve needed to improve the presentation of change notes with categories and search, which should help you find the changes of interest.
You can upgrade your wikis here:
https://tiddlywiki.com/prerelease/upgrade.html
While there are many new features that make wikitext more expressive and efficient, there are relatively few end user changes that can be found by clicking around TiddlyWiki.
Nonetheless, it a major release because of the groundwork it lays for future improvements.
We need lots of testing before the release of v5.4.0. Everyone can help, from end users and wikitext authors to JavaScript developers.
Here are some ways that end users can help:
- Perform test upgrades of your wikis and thoroughly test the features you depend on
- Test end user features such as the cascade details that are now shown in the tiddler info pane
Some of the new features that need to be tested by wikitext authors:
- Multi-valued variables and the
:letfilter run prefix - Dynamic parameters for procedure/function/macro invocations
- Background actions
- The new architecture for
$:/info/browser/*tiddlers - Improvements to the
<$diff-text>widget
You can report bugs and feedback here, or via GitHub.
Doing a good job of this sort of intensive testing is hard work, but it will pay off if it helps us have a smooth release without showstopping bugs.
We would also welcome feedback on the presentation of the release note. Is it easy enough to find out what you want to know? Are there other changes that we should be summarising?
All being well, we plan to release v5.4.0 in the second half of March.
Thank you to everyone for your help,
Best wishes
Jeremy