Hello Nextclouders,
We started a new section in our admin manual, called “Critical changes”, let me introduce you to it.
Nextcloud developers have maintained Github tickets with all critical changes for developers and admins for a while and we try our best to use that info and write a developer “App upgrade guide” for ever major release. This was meant to help Nextcloud App developers to make their lives easier when adjusting their apps to the new versions of Nextcloud and keeping up with the releases. Yet the important changes for admins didn’t have their place in the admin manual.
Therefore we started a section for critical changes with sub pages for every major release. The critical changes are hinted from all upgrade docs (for example this page) to make them discoverable for admins.
An example of a critical change that started the idea of this new section is the Swiftmailer to Symfony mailer migration in Nextcoud 26. Swiftmailer is no longer maintained so we had to swap the system email library. Unfortunately the new one does not yet support every specific feature of the old one and we can no longer authenticate via NTLM/Exchange. This is a critical change we should warn admins about so they don’t find out by surprise, after the upgrade. Further examples are any changes in platform requirements, like the PHP runtime or minimum database versions, or changes to the nginx config.
Keeping the critical changes for admins updated is now part of our development process. If you apply critical changes to Nextcloud, please submit a PR to the documentation repository right away.
Many thanks to my colleagues like @ChristophWurst who initiated this effort, we hope this change will make your lives as admins easier for future releases!
All the best!
but we’re doing good efforts to try to have the docs ready for each release