drupal 7.55

Maintenance release of the Drupal 7 series. Includes a variety of improvements and bug fixes (no major, non-backwards-compatible new functionality).

No security fixes are included in this release.

No changes have been made to the web.config, robots.txt or default settings.php files in this release, so upgrading custom versions of those files is not necessary.

There are two changes to the .htaccess file in this release:

• A change to support services such as Let's Encrypt by making Drupal not block the .well-known directory defined by RFC 5785 (see #2847325).
• A change to allow Drupal sites to work correctly on Apache 2.4 when the mod_access_compat Apache module is disabled (see #1599774).

Upgrading custom versions of .htaccess to incorporate these changes is recommended, but not required.

Known issues:

There are two known regressions in this release:

• This release changed Drupal's URL-generating functions to always encode '[' and ']', which exacerbated some preexisting issues in various modules:
  • When Views is used to generate custom links to entities with brackets in the URL query parameters names (due to array-based query parameters), the links no longer work correctly - see #2909709: Links to entity URIs with special characters in query parameter names are broken, especially since Drupal core 7.55 for details. Previously the bug would have occurred for other less common special characters only. A fix is discussed in the above issue, and a more comprehensive fix for Drupal core itself is proposed in #2909714: drupal_get_query_array() does not urldecode query names.
  • There are compatibility problems between the Search API ranges and Facet API Pretty Paths modules that were made worse by the Drupal 7.55 release. The problem is reportedly already fixed in the latest development version of the Search API ranges module. See #2891253: 1.5 + 7.55+ breaks Facetapi Pretty Paths. search api ranges needs a new release. fix is in dev, not yet released. for details.
• The change to .htaccess to support RFC 5785 (described above) breaks sites that are running on extremely old versions of the Apache web server, such as Apache 1.3. Upgrading to a supported version of Apache is recommended, but if necessary you can instead reverse the relevant .htaccess changes as a workaround. See #2887772: Drupal 7.55 .htaccess breaks Apache versions older than 2.0 for details.

Major changes since 7.54:

• #2877243: Fixed incompatibility with PHP versions 7.0.19 and 7.1.5 due to duplicate DATE_RFC7231 definition.
• #2847325: Allowed services such as Let's Encrypt to work with Drupal on Apache, by making Drupal's .htaccess file allow access to the .well-known directory defined by RFC 5785.
• #1599774: Made new Drupal sites work correctly on Apache 2.4 when the mod_access_compat Apache module is disabled.
• #2289867: Fixed Drupal's URL-generating functions to always encode '[' and ']' so that the URLs will pass HTML5 validation.
• Made Drupal core pass all automated tests on PHP 7.1.

All changes since 7.54:

• #1858486 by idebr, David_Rothstein, trawekp, joseph.olstad, MrHaroldA, jhedstrom: Ajax call breaks Password Reset
• #2853160 by hgoto, smaaz: Variable $name is defined but not used in file_get_content_headers()
• #2042239 by lucaslg, tbradbury, snehi, pkiraly, pjonckiere, oriol_e9g, ivanchaer, jhodgdon, chx, cilefen, David_Rothstein: Fix DeleteQuery::execute() return value documentation and DeleteQuery_sqlite documentation
• #2851725 by Jigar.addweb, tameeshb: Fix typos in various code comments in the includes directory
• #2451449 by drumm: User's contact setting reverts to default when saving
• #348815 by twistor, aerozeppelin, xjm, PROMES, nileema.jadhav, Jill L: Remove category from feed and feed items when category is deleted
• #1611430 by Berdir, brad.bulger, Stevel, sun, catch: Verbose debug output in unit tests relies on the database
• #1599774 by longwave, ben.bunk, Rob C, stefan.r, David_Rothstein, BTMash, kristofferwiklund, marcingy, mpdonadio, DuneBL, serundeputy, Letharion, quicksketch, alexpott, J-Lee, Morbus Iff: Drupal fails to boot with 503 error and .htaccess protections do not work on Apache 2.4 without mod_access_compat
• #1823504 by axel.rutz, michalis.kambi, Sylvain Lecoy: Unit tests (descendants of DrupalUnitTestCase) do not work when default site language is not English
• #1851530 by JvE, jcovington, tatarbj: Notice: Undefined index: status in _block_rehash()
• #2182265 by Sweetchuck, joseph.olstad, nod_, andrejsmuzikovs, Gábor Hojtsy, droplet, mr.baileys: Drupal.t() placeholder substitution doesn't always work correctly
• #2289867 by joseph.olstad, jamesrward, dman, superspring, legolasbo, bceyssens, mdeletter, anrikun, Damien Tournoud: W3C HTML5 Validation error with PHP array-based query-strings built with url() containing [ ] characters
• #2807393 by armrus, joseph.olstad, pankajchaudhari: Console error on Firefox due to redeclared function argument in Drupal.formatPlural
• #2883202 by David_Rothstein: Statistics module subtracts an empty string from an integer, causing PHP 7.1 test failures
• #2870289 by markcarver: file_ajax_upload() causes malformed Drupal.settings
• #1854074 by jp.stacey, jhodgdon, kiwimind: Docblock in field.tpl.php needs clarification in its reference to theme_field
• #2851665 by tameeshb: In the database schema.inc file, the class DatabaseSchema has no class documentation block
• #1886868 by IRuslan, zvse: Unused $original_destination variable in file_unmanaged_copy()
• #2819787 by chiranjeeb2410, shashikant_chauhan, stefan.r, Kartagis, naveenvalecha: The install message referencing insufficient PDO drivers links to the wrong documentation page
• #2847325 by sammuell, John Morahan, mfb, sanduhrs, D34dMan, C_Logemann, xumepadismal, serg2, walterebert, David Grudl: Support RFC 5785 on Apache by whitelisting the .well-known directory
• #2850773 by alexpott: Fix tempnam() usage in PHP 7.1
• #2880700 by David_Rothstein, cilefen, mpdonadio, xjm, Mile23: UserTimeZoneFunctionalTest fails on recent versions of PHP 7 and 7.1
• #2877243 by David_Rothstein, karoop, joseph.olstad, deminy: DATE_RFC7231 already defined in PHP 7.0.19 and 7.1.5