Merge 1.1 into master

[headius]

This is an attempt to merge in all changes from 1.1-stable into master for the next 1.2.x release.

The 1.1-stable branch diverged almost ten years ago, and only had one merge back to master in early 2015. Since then most maintenance and bug-fixing has occurred on the branch. This PR attempts to bring in all the changes for 1.1 and resolve the diff between the two branches so we can move forward with 1.2 releases.