6.21 release notes

June 16, 2022

This page describes release information relating to all Matrix 6.21 versions including patch releases.

Improvements

The following improvements were made in this version of Matrix.

Metadata fields are now supported in the side panel

You can now promote metadata sections to appear in the side panel area of content components.

Offering a side panel-style custom editing experience for metadata field completion was only possible through bespoke custom edit layouts, which often took days to implement and refine.

In this release of Matrix 6, this bespoke functionality is supported by default through the metadata side-panel. The new side panel lets you selectively hide different parts of your metadata schema so that the content parts of your metadata schema appear in the component on the Content screen. This means that you do not have to scroll past configuration fields to get to the metadata content parts that you regularly edit.

At the moment, the following metadata field types are not supported in the component metadata side-panel:

  • WYSIWYG

  • Date

  • Hierarchy

  • Thesaurus

Read Add a metadata schema section to the component metadata side-panel to learn how to apply this new feature to your existing metadata schema sections.

Minor improvements

The following minor improvements were made in this version of Matrix.

You can now adjust your SAML SameSite configuration through the Matrix 6 Admin UI instead of relying on SSH access to the Matrix server.

6.22.0 saml session cookie

Previously, adjusting the SAML cookie SameSite configuration required administrators with SSH access to manually edit the data/private/conf/simplesaml/config.php file directly on the server. This new feature means you can configure SAML authentication entirely from within the Matrix 6 Admin UI if your SAML Identity Provider (IdP) requires POST binding.

Settings validation ensures that implementations that already have session.cookie.samesite configuration in place for SameSite settings will continue to apply with the introduction of this feature.

Read the SAML account manager documentation for more information about the available settings.

Bug fixes

The following bugs were resolved in this version of Matrix.

6.21.0

  • A bug was discovered with the asset picker in the admin UI where you could navigate away from the screen where you selected an asset, and the picker would remain on the tree. Now, if the picking state is active and the user performs a new action (such as navigating to a new screen), the picking state becomes disabled. This change in selection behavior fixes the previously reported issue. (MATRIX-4951)

  • A bug was discovered with logging where data/private/logs/http.log was being corrupted due to not locking the file during writes. This logging issue caused logs to become corrupted and unreadable by the Log manager screen. A fix to log streams that lock files before writing them results in log records no longer having formatting errors. The Log manager now shows logs reliably. (MATRIX-4984)

  • An upgrade of PHP to PHP7.4 caused PHP deprecation warnings to appear when interacting with locks (for example, opening the user menu, creating and editing assets, etc). The fix replaced the deprecated Redis function calls with supported function calls, preventing Redis errors from occurring. (MATRIX-4956)

  • An issue with how Matrix recorded asset permission changes made it difficult to determine which user or group made the permission change. The user or group ID that made the change is now included in permission change log entries, which means you can more easily work out which user or group made a permission change. (MATRIX-4968)

6.21.2

  • A malformed query selector introduced by accident in the asset picker resulted in JavaScript errors that prevented users from selecting an asset from the asset tree. The fix to the query selector removed a quotation error that caused the selector to become malformed. The asset picker now allows you to select assets as it did before.