Ghost Release: 3.40.3

TL;DR

Ghost 3.40.3 is a maintenance release that addresses several important bugs affecting newsletters, redirects, subscriptions, and theme management. This release improves the reliability of core features like email delivery, URL redirects, and membership management without introducing any breaking changes. Site owners should update to ensure proper functioning of newsletters and member management features.

Highlight of the Release

• Fixed reply-to address functionality for newsletters, ensuring reader responses reach you
• Improved URL redirects to properly handle query parameters
• Fixed complimentary subscription re-enabling process
• Resolved theme switching locale loading issues
• Added better error translations for improved user experience

Migration Guide

No migration steps are required for this release. This is a patch release (3.40.2 → 3.40.3) focused on bug fixes that should not require any changes to your existing Ghost installation beyond the standard update process.

Upgrade Recommendations

This release contains several important bug fixes for newsletters, redirects, and subscription management. We recommend all Ghost users upgrade to version 3.40.3, especially if you:

• Use the newsletter feature
• Have configured URL redirects on your site
• Manage members with complimentary subscriptions
• Use themes with different locale settings

The update is a standard patch release and should be straightforward to apply using your normal update process.

Bug Fixes

Email & Newsletter Fixes

• Fixed reply-to address not being set correctly for newsletters, ensuring reader responses reach the intended inbox
• Added translation for BookshelfRelationsError to provide more user-friendly error messages

URL & Redirect Fixes

• Fixed redirects "to" query parameters forwarding, ensuring query parameters in the destination URL take precedence over incoming query parameters while passing through the rest

Subscription & Member Management Fixes

• Fixed re-enabling of complimentary subscriptions by properly checking for existing active complimentary subscriptions
• Fixed duplicate customers showing for members with multiple subscriptions, improving the member management interface

Theme Management Fixes

• Fixed incorrect locale loading when changing themes, ensuring proper language support when switching between themes with different locale data

New Features

No significant new features were added in this release. This is primarily a bug fix release focused on improving stability and reliability of existing functionality.

Security Updates

No security fixes were explicitly mentioned in this release. The updates to dependencies like sanitize-html (v2.3.0), @sentry/node (v5.29.2), and jwks-rsa (v1.12.1) may include security improvements, but they were not specifically highlighted as security fixes.

Performance Improvements

No specific performance improvements were highlighted in this release. The focus was on bug fixes and stability improvements rather than performance enhancements.

Impact Summary

Ghost 3.40.3 is a maintenance release that addresses several important bugs affecting core functionality. The most significant fixes improve newsletter delivery by ensuring reply-to addresses are correctly set, fix URL redirects to properly handle query parameters, resolve issues with complimentary subscriptions, and improve theme switching with proper locale loading.

For newsletter publishers, this update ensures that readers can properly reply to your newsletters. Site administrators will benefit from more reliable URL redirects and theme management. Membership managers will see improvements in subscription handling, particularly for complimentary subscriptions.

This release also includes several dependency updates, including sanitize-html, eslint, and Sentry packages. No breaking changes were introduced, making this a safe and recommended update for all Ghost installations.

Full Release Notes