Ghost Release: 5.32.0

TL;DR

Ghost v5.32.0 focuses on fixing critical email and subscription issues. It addresses problems with email segment generation, member tier subscription expiry dates, and reduces concurrency when fetching Mailgun events to prevent connection pool exhaustion. This release improves reliability for publishers who depend on Ghost's membership and newsletter features.

Highlight of the Release

• Fixed email segment generation to correctly target all intended recipients
• Fixed invalid expiry dates for member tier subscriptions when upgrading from complimentary to paid
• Reduced concurrency when fetching Mailgun events to prevent connection pool exhaustion
• Improved email error logging with Sentry integration and error codes

Migration Guide

No specific migration steps are required for this update. The release includes automatic migrations to fix existing member tier subscriptions with invalid expiry dates.

The migrations will:

1. Remove invalid expiry tier dates for paid members
2. Restore missing tier mappings for paid members

These migrations run automatically during the update process.

Upgrade Recommendations

This release is recommended for all Ghost users, especially those who:

• Use the newsletter and email features
• Have members with paid subscriptions
• Previously offered complimentary subscriptions that were later upgraded to paid

The fixes for email segment generation and member tier subscription expiry are particularly important for sites with paid memberships and active newsletters.

Bug Fixes

Fixed Email Segment Generation

The email segment targeting system has been fixed to correctly handle content visibility rules. Previously, if a part of an email was only visible for status:free members, the system incorrectly excluded status:-free members from receiving the email entirely. This has been corrected to ensure emails are properly sent to all intended recipient segments regardless of content visibility rules.

Fixed Invalid Expiry for Member Tier Subscriptions

When members upgraded from a complimentary subscription with an expiry date to a paid subscription of the same tier, they would eventually lose access when the original complimentary subscription expired. This happened because the expiry_at field on the tier mapping was not being removed during the upgrade process. This release:

• Fixes the code to set expiry as null when a member upgrades to a paid subscription
• Adds two migrations to fix existing affected accounts:
  • Removes invalid expiry tier dates for paid members
  • Restores missing tier mappings for paid members

New Features

No significant new features were added in this release. This version focuses primarily on bug fixes and performance improvements for existing functionality.

Security Updates

No specific security fixes were included in this release.

Performance Improvements

Reduced Concurrency When Fetching Mailgun Events

This release improves the performance and reliability of email processing by:

• Adding a small sleep between dispatching events in the worker thread that reads events from Mailgun
• Reducing concurrent sending from 10 to 2
• Preventing connection pool exhaustion during email sending
• Reducing the chance of new connections falling back on delayed replicated databases

These changes help maintain stable database connections during high-volume email operations.

Impact Summary

Ghost v5.32.0 delivers important fixes for email delivery and membership functionality. The email segment generation fix ensures newsletters reach all intended recipients, regardless of content visibility rules. The subscription expiry fix prevents paid members from losing access after upgrading from complimentary subscriptions.

Performance improvements to Mailgun event processing help prevent database connection pool exhaustion, which could previously cause email processing issues during high-volume sending. The improved error logging with Sentry integration and error codes will help administrators troubleshoot any email delivery problems more effectively.

These changes collectively improve the reliability of Ghost's core membership and newsletter features, which are critical for publishers using Ghost as a business platform.

Full Release Notes