Wagtail 2.15.2 release notes

January 18, 2022

What’s new

CVE-2022-21683: Comment reply notifications sent to incorrect users

This release addresses an information disclosure issue in Wagtail’s commenting feature. Previously, when notifications for new replies in comment threads were sent, they were sent to all users who had replied or commented anywhere on the site, rather than only in the relevant threads. This meant that a user could listen in to new comment replies on pages they did not have editing access to, as long as they had left a comment or reply somewhere on the site.

Many thanks to Ihor Marhitych for reporting this issue. For further details, please see the CVE-2022-21683 security advisory.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed transform operations in Filter.run() when image has been re-oriented (Justin Michalicek)

  • Remove extraneous header action buttons when creating or editing workflows and tasks (Matt Westcott)

  • Ensure that bulk publish actions pick up the latest draft revision (Matt Westcott)

  • Ensure the checkbox_aria_label is used correctly in the Bulk Actions checkboxes (Vu Pham)

  • Prevent error on MySQL search backend when searching three or more terms (Aldán Creo)

  • Allow wagtail.search app migrations to complete on versions of SQLite without full-text search support (Matt Westcott)

  • Update Pillow dependency to allow 9.x (Matt Westcott)

Upgrade considerations

Support for SQLite without full-text search support

This release restores the ability to run Wagtail against installations of SQLite that do not include the fts5 extension for full-text search support. On these installations, the fallback search backend (without support for full-text queries) will be used, and the database table for storing indexed content will not be created.

If SQLite is subsequently upgraded to a version with fts5 support, existing databases will still be missing this table, and full-text search will continue to be unavailable until it is created. To correct this, first make a backup copy of the database (since rolling back the migration could potentially reverse other schema changes), then run:

./manage.py migrate wagtailsearch 0005
./manage.py migrate
./manage.py update_index

Additionally, since the database search backend now needs to run a query on initialisation to check for the presence of this table, calling wagtail.search.backends.get_search_backend during application startup may now fail with a “Models aren’t loaded yet” error. Code that does this should be updated to only call get_search_backend at the point when a search query is to be performed.