Rails 4.0.11.1 and 4.1.7.1 have been released

A minor mistake was made with the 4.0.12 and 4.1.8 releases as they included other unrelated patches, hence the Rails Core team released 4.0.11.1 and 4.1.7.1 These two new releases contains only the patch for CVE-2014-7829, to make the upgrade as easy as possible.

If you already upgraded to 4.0.12 or 4.1.8 you can safely skip these releases.

This week's Rails Contributors

This week 24 people contributed to Rails; five of them is a newcomer (Shunsuke Aida, Javier Vidal, Ilya Katz, George Millo, Calvin Correli). Big thanks to all of them!

Active Record performance optimizations

Continuing the optimization spree from last week, Sean Griffin from the Rails team has committed a number of optimizations for Active Record
with the help from Sam Saffron from the Discourse team.

For instance this commit makes the initialisation of ActiveRecord objects faster by using lazy lookup.

Wrap code snippets in + in documentation

If you are planning to contribute to the docs this might be useful to know. In the documentation you need to use +...+ to wrap inline code snippets but it only works for basic identifiers. For more elaborate code snippets you'd want to use the tt tag instead.
If you want to dig deeper into how to format documentation there is a handy guide for you.

`_will_change!` method is not needed any more

The upcoming 4.2 release will have the ability to detect in-place changes automatically, which means you won't have to call the_column_will_change! method anymore when working with hstore and json columns.

Deprecate Magic™ default for `log_level`

The default log level for new applications has changed to :debug, from :info and a deprecation warning has been added in case you don't have a log_level set in production. This is a step towards unifying the log_level in Rails 5.