What's new in eLabFTW 4.5.0

Introduction

This release comes quite fast after the release of 4.4. The goal being to bring new features and bugfixes to end users faster.

So what’s new in this version?

You can see the complete changelog on the release page. This blog post is more about going into details for some of the changes.

How to update

Update like usual: see documentation.

New features

Users features

Major feature: improved permissions system

The permissions system has been overhauled. There is still the basic permissions where you can choose between “Public”, “Organization”, “All the teams I’m part of”, “User + Admins” and “Only me”, but now it is possible to combine this setting with Teams, Teamgroups or individual users. And you can have several of each, or just one, with all combinations possible.

new permissions

Example for a super secret experiment

Set the Base setting to “Only me”, and add a user with read-access.

Example for sharing to several teams

Set the Base setting to “User + Admins”, and select only the teams you want it to be shared with.

Improved sharing with anonymous users

At the bottom of the modal for viewing permissions, you will find a checkbox to allow sharing the entry with anonymous users (users with no accounts). This is done by generating a special “access key” that can be revoked at any time. Previously, the elabid worked as an access key, but it is no longer the case.

anon share

For this to work, the Sysadmin must allow anonymous users to connect.

Extra field builder

Adding extra fields through the JSON metadata is now easier thanks to the integrated builder/helper:

field builder

Select which type of input you want, enter the name, an optional description or default value, and click Save to see it integrated. It is also now possible to allow selecting several choices from a “Dropdown menu” input.

The description attribute is also new. Lastly, you can choose to hide the main text body and leave only the extra fields by adding "display_main_text": false in the "elabftw" object in the JSON metadata.

Admin features

  • It is now possible to easily add tags for the team from the Admin panel, in the tag manager.

Sysadmin features

  • LDAP: you can now configure LDAP to search a user by username or any other attribute. So users can login with a username instead of an email.
  • Add tags:teamssync command to synchronize tags between different teams.

Conclusion

This release features some highly anticipated changes that I’m sure will be most welcome for users.

I would like to thank all the people that contributed to the code, opened issues and tested this new release.

Special thanks to the sponsors and to Marcel Bolten for his continuous quality contributions!

Now go upgrade your instance and if you’re not the sysadmin, ask your sysadmin to upgrade to benefit from these new features and all the bugfixes!