setting since version 1.2.0. If you have it on, turn it *off* if you can.
-== MediaWiki 1.4 BETA ==
-
-[Not everything is 100% working in beta yet, the installer needs fixes still.]
-
-Major changes from 1.3.x:
-* Support for table prefixes for better sharing with other web apps
-* (?) PostgreSQL support
-* Optional article validation voting features
-* 'Recentchanges Patrol' to mark new edits that haven't yet been viewed
-* Support for faster C++ diff module (WikiDiff extension)
-* More scary link caching modes
-* Old manually maintained log pages replaced with searchable Special:Log
-* Skins system more modular: templates and CSS are now in /skins/
-* New user preference for limitting the image size for images on image description
- pages
-* Error pages no more offer edit / talk / watch links (bug #502)
-* Allow user to preview article on first edit (bug #530)
-* New dark background skin named Amethyst (thanks Sorwena and Sorkhiri)
-* [[RFC 1234]] will now make an internal link (bug #479)
-* PhpTal skins shown bogus 'What links here' etc on special pages (bug #511)
-* Experimental code to manage user and group rights (Special:Userlevels)
-* UI language switching
-* Adding filter and username exact search match for Special:Listusers (bug #770)
-* Special:Listadmins outdated, use Special:Listusers instead (bug #857)
-* Traditional/Simplified Chinese conversion
-* New tag "<gallery>" to generate a table of image thumbnails
-* Installer die if it can not write LocalSettings.php (bug #733)
-* Various special pages no more show the rss/atom feed links (bug #705)
-* Support for external authentication plug-ins
-* (bug 114) use category backlinks in Special:Recentchangeslinked
-* ... and more!
+== MediaWiki 1.5 alpha 1 ==
+
+May 3, 2005
+
+This is a testing preview release, being put out mainly to aid testers in
+finding installation bugs and other major problems. It is strongly recommended
+NOT to run a live production web site on this alpha release.
+
+** WARNING: USE OF THIS ALPHA RELEASE MAY INFEST YOUR HOUSE WITH **
+** TERMITES, ROT YOUR TEETH, GROW HAIR ON YOUR PALMS, AND PASTE **
+** INNUENDO INTO YOUR C.V. RIGHT BEFORE A JOB INTERVIEW! **
+** DON'T SAY WE DIDN'T WARN YOU, MAN. WE TOTALLY DID RIGHT HERE. **
+
+
+=== Big changes ===
+
+Schema:
+ The core table schema has changed significantly. This should make better
+ use of the database's cache and disk I/O, and make significantly speed up
+ rename and delete operations on pages with very long edit histories.
+
+ Unfortunately this does mean upgrading a wiki of size from 1.4 will require
+ some downtime for the schema restructuring, but future storage backend
+ changes should be able to integrate into the new system more easily.
+
+Permalinks:
+ The current revision of a page now has a permanent 'oldid' number assigned
+ immediately, and the id numbers are now preserved across deletion/undeletion.
+ A permanent reference to the current revision of a page is now just a matter
+ of going to the 'history' tab and copying the first link in the list.
+
+Page move log:
+ Renames of pages are now recorded in Special:Log and the page history.
+ A handy revert link is available from the log for sysops.
+
+Editing diff:
+ Ever lost track of what you'd done so far during an edit? A 'Show diff'
+ button on the edit page now makes it easy to remember.
+
+Uploads:
+ It's now possible to specify the final filename of an upload distinct
+ from the original filename on your disk.
+
+ An image link for a missing file will now take you straight to the upload page.
+
+ More metadata is pre-extracted from uploaded images, which will ease pressure
+ on disk or NFS volumes used to store images. EXIF metadata is displayed on
+ the image description page if PHP is configured with the necessary module.
+
+User accounts:
+ There are some changes to the user permissions system, with assignable
+ groups. This is still somewhat in flux; do not rely on the present system
+ that you see in this alpha to still be there.
+
+E-mail:
+ User-to-user e-mail can now be restricted to require a mail-back confirmation
+ first to reduce potential for abuse with false addresses.
+
+ Updates to user talk pages and watchlist entries can optionally send e-mail
+ notifications.
+
+External hooks:
+ A somewhat experimental interface for hooking in an external editor
+ application is included. This may not be on by default in final release,
+ depending on support.
+
+And...
+ A bunch of stuff we forgot to mention.
+
+
+=== What's gone? ===
+
+Latin-1:
+ Wikis must now be encoded in Unicode UTF-8; this has been the default for
+ some time, but some languages could optionally be installed in Latin-1 mode.
+ This is no longer supported.
+
+MySQL 3.x:
+ Some optimization hacks for MySQL 3.x have been removed as part of the schema
+ clean-up (specifically, the inverse_timestamp fields). MediaWiki 1.5 should
+ still run, but wikis of significant size should very seriously consider
+ upgrading to a more modern release. MySQL 3.x support will probably be
+ entirely dropped in the next major release later this year.
+
+Special:Maintenance
+ These tools were, ironically enough, not really maintained. This special
+ page has been removed; insofar as some of its pieces were useful and haven't
+ already been supplanted by other special pages they should be rewritten in
+ an efficient and safe manner in the future.
+
+
+=== What's still waiting? ===
+
+These things should be fixed by the time 1.5.0 final is released:
+
+Upgrade:
+ Wikis in Latin-1 encoding are no longer supported; only Unicode UTF-8.
+ A new option $wgLegacyEncoding is provided to allow on-the-fly recoding of
+ old page text entries, but other metadata fields (titles, comments etc) need
+ to be pre-converted. The upgrade process does not yet fully automate this.
+
+ In general the upgrade from 1.4 to 1.5 schema has not been tested for all
+ cases, and there may be problems.
+
+Backups:
+ The text entries of deleted pages are no longer removed from the main
+ text table on deletion. If you provide public backup dumps of your databases,
+ you will probably want to use the new XML-format dump generator... but
+ this hasn't been finished yet.
+
+PostgreSQL:
+ The table definitions for PostgreSQL install are out of date, and patches
+ to support PostgreSQL from the main installer are still pending.
+
+MySQL 4.1+:
+ Proper charset encoding / collation configuration for installs on MySQL 4.1
+ and higher still needs to be fiddled with. Some bits may fail on the UTF-8
+ setting due to some long field keys.
+
+Authentication plugin fixes:
+ The AuthPlugin interface needs some improvements to work better with LDAP,
+ HTTP basic auth, and other such environments. Some patches are pending.
+
+
+=== Smaller changes ===
+
+Various bugfixes, small features, and a few experimental things:
+
+* 'live preview' reduces preview reload burden on supported browsers
+* Schema reworking: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposed_Database_Schema_Changes/October_2004
+* New WikiSyntax: -- turns into — or – depending on context
+* (bug 15) Allow editors to view diff of their change before actually submitting an edit
+* (bug 190) Hide your own edits on the watchlist
+* (bug 510): Special:Randompage now works for other namespaces than NS_MAIN.
+* (bug 1015) support for the full wikisyntax in <gallery> captions.
+* (bug 1105) A "Destination filename" (save as) added to Special:Upload Upload.
+* (bug 1352) Images on description pages now get thumbnailed regardless of whether the thumbnail is larger than the original.
+* (bug 1662) A new magicword, {{CURRENTMONTHABBREV}} returns the abbreviation of the current month
+* (bug 1668) 'Date format' supported for other languages than English, see:
+ http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-March/028364.html
+* (bug 1739) A new magicword, {{REVISIONID}} give you the article or diff database
+ revision id, useful for proper citation.
+* (bug 1998) Updated the Russian translation.
+* (bug 2064) Configurable JavaScript mimetype with $wgJsMimeType
+* (bug 2084) Fixed a regular expression in includes/Title.php that was accepting invalid syntax like #REDIRECT [[foo] in redirects
+* It's now possible to invert the namespace selection at Special:Allpages and Special:Contributions
+* No longer using sorbs.net to check for open proxies by default.
+* What was $wgDisableUploads is now $wgEnableUploads, and should be set to true if one wishes to enable uploads.
+* Supplying a reason for a block is no longer mandatory
+* Language conversion support for category pages
+* $wgStyleSheetDirectory is no longer an alias for $wgStyleDirectory;
+* Special:Movepage can now take paramaters like Special:Movepage/Page_to_move
+ (used to just be able to take paramaters via a GET request like index.php?title=Special:Movepage&target=Page_to_move)
+* Deprecated the {{msg:template}} syntax for referring to templates
+* ...and more!
+
+
+=== Changes since 1.5alpha1 ===
+
+* ...various...
+* (bug 2067) Fixed crash on empty quoted HTML attribute
+* (bug 2079) Removed links to Special:Maintenance from movepagetext messages
+* Fix for reading incorrectly re-gzipped HistoryBlob entries
+* (bug 1906) Generalize project namespace for Latin localization, update namespaces
+* (bug 2075) Corrected namespace definitions in Tamil localization
+* Add $wgLegacySchemaConversion update-time option to reduce amount of
+ copying during the schema upgrade: creates HistoryBlobCurStub reference
+ records in text instead of copying all the cur_text fields. Requires
+ that the cur table be left in place until/unless such fields are migrated
+ into the main text store.
+* (bug 1692) Fix margin on unwatch tab
+* HistoryBlobStub: the last-used HistoryBlob is kept open to speed up
+ multiple-revision pulls
+* Special:Export now includes page, revision, and user id numbers by
+ default (previously this was disabled for no particular reason)
+* dumpBackup.php can dump the full database to Export XML, with current
+ revisions only or complete histories.
+* (bug 2150) Fix tab indexes on edit form
+* (bug 2152) Add missing bgcolor to attribute whitelist for <td> and <th>
+
=== Caveats ===
cases, but this is not recommended on live sites. (This must be set for
MathML to display properly in Mozilla.)
-The new 'MonoBook' skin is not compatible with PHP 5 due to bugs in the
-underlying PHPTAL library. It will be automatically disabled when running
-on PHP5; the older look and feel will be used instead.
-
-For notes on 1.3.x and older releases, see HISTORY.
+For notes on 1.4.x and older releases, see HISTORY.
=== Online documentation ===
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
+A low-traffic announcements-only list is also available:
+ http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-announce
+
+It's highly recommended that you sign up for one of these lists if you're
+going to run a public MediaWiki, so you can be notified of security fixes.
+
=== IRC help ===