Ghost Release: 3.8.0

TL;DR

Ghost 3.8.0 introduces member avatars in themes, fixes email count issues, and enhances member management capabilities. This release improves the member experience with Gravatar integration, adds support for importing member creation dates, and allows editing of member email addresses. Several bugs were fixed, including incorrect email counts on post publishing and infinite scroll issues in the admin interface.

Highlight of the Release

• Added member.avatar_image for member gravatars in themes
• Fixed incorrect email count display on post publish
• Added ability to edit member email addresses
• Added support for importing member creation dates via CSV

Migration Guide

No specific migration steps are required for this release. The database migration for adding members.geolocation will run automatically when upgrading.

If you're a theme developer who wants to implement the new member avatar feature, you can now access member.avatar_image in your theme templates to display Gravatar images for your members.

Upgrade Recommendations

This is a recommended upgrade for all Ghost users, especially those who use the members feature. The release contains important bug fixes for email counts and admin UI, along with useful new features for member management.

There are no breaking changes in this release, making it a safe upgrade for all installations. Standard upgrade procedures apply.

Bug Fixes

Fixed Incorrect Email Count on Post Publish

Fixed an issue where the email data attached to a post when published with the "send email" flag was not properly filtered based on member access. This resulted in incorrect data being stored in the emails table and an inaccurate count of "emails sent" being displayed in the Admin interface. Note that the actual email delivery was still correctly gated by member access, so no emails were sent to members without proper access.

Fixed Infinite Scroll in Admin Interface

Resolved an issue with infinite scroll functionality on posts and pages lists in the admin interface, improving navigation and content management experience.

Other Bug Fixes

• Fixed missing frame parameter in member mapper to prevent potential bugs
• Added handling for missing resource paths for resized images

New Features

Member Avatar Support in Themes

Ghost now provides member.avatar_image property for themes, allowing theme developers to display member Gravatar images. When a member has an email address and Gravatar is not disabled, Ghost generates a Gravatar URL using the ?d=blank parameter to return a transparent image if no Gravatar exists for the member's email.

Member Management Improvements

• Editable Email Addresses: Administrators can now edit member email addresses
• Creation Date Import: Added support for importing the created_at field via CSV, using RFC 2822 compliant format
• Geolocation Preparation: Added database migration to support future geolocation features for members

Enhanced Proxy Support

Added "trust proxy" to the members API app to ensure correct IP and forwarded host names when running behind proxies, matching the configuration of other Express apps in Ghost.

Security Updates

No specific security fixes were mentioned in this release.

Performance Improvements

Test Suite Improvements

• Enabled the full test suite on Renovate PRs instead of just regression tests, preventing bad updates from being merged
• Combined Ghost-CLI tests into a single GitHub Action job for more efficient CI processing

Dependency Cleanup

• Removed unused cpy-cli dependency to reduce package size

Impact Summary

Ghost 3.8.0 enhances the members feature with several quality-of-life improvements including Gravatar support, editable email addresses, and creation date imports. The release fixes important bugs in the admin interface and email count reporting, providing a more accurate and smoother experience for content creators and administrators.

Theme developers gain new capabilities with the member.avatar_image property, allowing for richer member-focused UI components. The groundwork for future geolocation features has been laid with database preparations.

This release also includes several dependency updates and internal improvements to the testing infrastructure, ensuring better quality control for future updates.

Full Release Notes