The Open WebUI on AWS by FOSSonCloud pattern now ships Open WebUI 0.11.0, up from 0.6.36. That’s five major versions across roughly nine months — the widest feature range of any pattern this cycle — and it ends with an interface that was rebuilt from the ground up. Plan this one as a rollout, not a patch.
What changed
0.7.0 (January 2026) — native function calling
Native function calling with built-in tools, letting a single request combine web research, knowledge-base queries, and note-taking. Citation links now jump directly to the relevant portion of a source document with automatic highlighting. Models gained the ability to be pinned or hidden per-workspace, and Admin Settings got a fuzzy-search bar.
0.8.0 (February 2026) — images and developer surface
A new Images playground for testing image generation and editing directly in the admin interface, playground chat export, dynamic dropdown fields for tool and function developers, OAuth token exchange, and custom Weaviate endpoint support.
0.9.0 (April 2026) — MCP investment
Deeper Model Context Protocol support: configurable timeouts, static OAuth for tool servers, back-channel logout for OIDC providers, and reliability fixes so provider errors no longer left chats stuck loading forever.
0.9.x point releases — the Skills system
Introduced and matured Skills — a way to package reusable capabilities that reliably inject into the system prompt, with public-sharing permissions and slash-command invocation — plus full tool, RAG, and MCP support inside Channels, not just standard chats.
0.10.0 (June 2026) — MCP maturity and search
Restrictable OAuth scopes and configurable resource-parameter behavior for MCP, two new web search providers (SERPHouse, Microsoft Web IQ), optional web-search confirmation prompts for users, and drag-to-reorder pinned notes.
0.11.0 (July 27, 2026) — the redesign
The interface was rebuilt from the ground up: a narrower conversation column, lighter typography, tidier spacing, consistent menus, and a completely redesigned first-run welcome screen. Alongside that:
- The admin panel moved into Settings.
- Archived Chats moved from the user menu into Settings, where it’s now searchable and sortable.
- Keyboard shortcuts became fully rebindable, with conflict warnings, plus a toggle to disable shortcuts entirely.
- Typing
/in the message box now surfaces Skills as slash commands. - Auto-generated chat and note titles got shorter — 2–4 words, no emoji by default.
Why it matters
Two things stand out across this range.
The Skills system plus deepened MCP support is the consequential part. Together they turn Open WebUI from a chat front-end into a platform you can build agent-style workflows on: MCP gives you a standard way to attach tools and data sources with proper OAuth scoping, and Skills give you a way to package and share reusable behavior across your team without copy-pasting system prompts. If you’re running Open WebUI as internal AI infrastructure rather than just a chat window, this is the release range that makes that viable.
The 0.11.0 redesign is the part that will generate support tickets. Moving the admin panel into Settings and relocating Archived Chats are both changes to muscle memory. Nothing is lost — Archived Chats is arguably better where it is now, since it’s searchable — but users who go looking in the old place and don’t find it will assume something broke.
The MCP OAuth scoping deserves a specific mention on a self-hosted deployment: being able to restrict what a tool server is allowed to request is the difference between “we connected a tool” and “we connected a tool safely.”
What you should do
- Plan a rollout, not a silent upgrade. Coming from 0.6.x, this is effectively five feature releases arriving at once.
- Send your users a short “here’s where things moved” note before you upgrade. Cover two things at minimum: the admin panel now lives in Settings, and Archived Chats moved into Settings too (and is now searchable and sortable). That one paragraph will absorb most of the confusion.
- Review your MCP tool server configuration if you use MCP. The new restrictable OAuth scopes are worth adopting deliberately — set the narrowest scope each tool actually needs.
- Evaluate Skills for the prompts your team already shares informally. If people are pasting the same system prompt into chats, that’s a Skill waiting to be packaged, and it becomes invokable with
/in the message box. - Check whether custom keyboard shortcuts matter to your users. Shortcuts are now fully rebindable with conflict warnings, and can be disabled entirely — useful if they clash with browser or OS bindings in your environment.
- Confirm the pattern’s current status before a wide rollout. This pattern is still marked WIP, so check with us before standing it up for a large user base.
Version details in this post come from Open WebUI’s own release notes. If you hit anything upgrading the pattern, open an issue on GitHub.
— FOSSonCloud