RELEASE-NOTES

   1 = MediaWiki release notes =
   2
   3 Security reminder: MediaWiki does not require PHP's register_globals
   4 setting since version 1.2.0. If you have it on, turn it *off* if you can.
   5
   6
   7 == MediaWiki 1.5 alpha 1 ==
   8
   9 May 3, 2005
  10
  11 This is a testing preview release, being put out mainly to aid testers in
  12 finding installation bugs and other major problems. It is strongly recommended
  13 NOT to run a live production web site on this alpha release.
  14
  15 **  WARNING: USE OF THIS ALPHA RELEASE MAY INFEST YOUR HOUSE WITH  **
  16 **  TERMITES, ROT YOUR TEETH,  GROW HAIR ON YOUR PALMS, AND PASTE  **
  17 **  INNUENDO  INTO  YOUR  C.V.  RIGHT  BEFORE  A  JOB  INTERVIEW!  **
  18 **  DON'T SAY WE DIDN'T WARN YOU, MAN. WE TOTALLY DID RIGHT HERE.  **
  19
  20
  21 === Big changes ===
  22
  23 Schema:
  24   The core table schema has changed significantly. This should make better
  25   use of the database's cache and disk I/O, and make significantly speed up
  26   rename and delete operations on pages with very long edit histories.
  27
  28   Unfortunately this does mean upgrading a wiki of size from 1.4 will require
  29   some downtime for the schema restructuring, but future storage backend
  30   changes should be able to integrate into the new system more easily.
  31
  32 Permalinks:
  33   The current revision of a page now has a permanent 'oldid' number assigned
  34   immediately, and the id numbers are now preserved across deletion/undeletion.
  35   A permanent reference to the current revision of a page is now just a matter
  36   of going to the 'history' tab and copying the first link in the list.
  37
  38 Page move log:
  39   Renames of pages are now recorded in Special:Log and the page history.
  40   A handy revert link is available from the log for sysops.
  41
  42 Editing diff:
  43   Ever lost track of what you'd done so far during an edit? A 'Show diff'
  44   button on the edit page now makes it easy to remember.
  45
  46 Uploads:
  47   It's now possible to specify the final filename of an upload distinct
  48   from the original filename on your disk.
  49
  50   An image link for a missing file will now take you straight to the upload page.
  51
  52   More metadata is pre-extracted from uploaded images, which will ease pressure
  53   on disk or NFS volumes used to store images. EXIF metadata is displayed on
  54   the image description page if PHP is configured with the necessary module.
  55
  56 User accounts:
  57   There are some changes to the user permissions system, with assignable
  58   groups. This is still somewhat in flux; do not rely on the present system
  59   that you see in this alpha to still be there.
  60
  61 E-mail:
  62   User-to-user e-mail can now be restricted to require a mail-back confirmation
  63   first to reduce potential for abuse with false addresses.
  64
  65   Updates to user talk pages and watchlist entries can optionally send e-mail
  66   notifications.
  67
  68 External hooks:
  69   A somewhat experimental interface for hooking in an external editor
  70   application is included. This may not be on by default in final release,
  71   depending on support.
  72
  73 And...
  74   A bunch of stuff we forgot to mention.
  75
  76
  77 === What's gone? ===
  78
  79 Latin-1:
  80   Wikis must now be encoded in Unicode UTF-8; this has been the default for
  81   some time, but some languages could optionally be installed in Latin-1 mode.
  82   This is no longer supported.
  83
  84 MySQL 3.x:
  85   Some optimization hacks for MySQL 3.x have been removed as part of the schema
  86   clean-up (specifically, the inverse_timestamp fields). MediaWiki 1.5 should
  87   still run, but wikis of significant size should very seriously consider
  88   upgrading to a more modern release. MySQL 3.x support will probably be
  89   entirely dropped in the next major release later this year.
  90
  91 Special:Maintenance
  92   These tools were, ironically enough, not really maintained. This special
  93   page has been removed; insofar as some of its pieces were useful and haven't
  94   already been supplanted by other special pages they should be rewritten in
  95   an efficient and safe manner in the future.
  96
  97
  98 === What's still waiting? ===
  99
 100 These things should be fixed by the time 1.5.0 final is released:
 101
 102 Upgrade:
 103   Wikis in Latin-1 encoding are no longer supported; only Unicode UTF-8.
 104   A new option $wgLegacyEncoding is provided to allow on-the-fly recoding of
 105   old page text entries, but other metadata fields (titles, comments etc) need
 106   to be pre-converted. The upgrade process does not yet fully automate this.
 107
 108   In general the upgrade from 1.4 to 1.5 schema has not been tested for all
 109   cases, and there may be problems.
 110
 111 Backups:
 112   The text entries of deleted pages are no longer removed from the main
 113   text table on deletion. If you provide public backup dumps of your databases,
 114   you will probably want to use the new XML-format dump generator... but
 115   this hasn't been finished yet.
 116
 117 PostgreSQL:
 118   The table definitions for PostgreSQL install are out of date, and patches
 119   to support PostgreSQL from the main installer are still pending.
 120
 121 MySQL 4.1+:
 122   Proper charset encoding / collation configuration for installs on MySQL 4.1
 123   and higher still needs to be fiddled with. Some bits may fail on the UTF-8
 124   setting due to some long field keys.
 125
 126 Authentication plugin fixes:
 127   The AuthPlugin interface needs some improvements to work better with LDAP,
 128   HTTP basic auth, and other such environments. Some patches are pending.
 129
 130
 131 === Smaller changes ===
 132
 133 Various bugfixes, small features, and a few experimental things:
 134
 135 * 'live preview' reduces preview reload burden on supported browsers
 136 * support for external editors for files and wiki pages:
 137   http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:External_editors
 138 * Schema reworking: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposed_Database_Schema_Changes/October_2004
 139 * New WikiSyntax: -- turns into &mdash; or &ndash; depending on context
 140 * (bug 15) Allow editors to view diff of their change before actually submitting an edit
 141 * (bug 190) Hide your own edits on the watchlist
 142 * (bug 510): Special:Randompage now works for other namespaces than NS_MAIN.
 143 * (bug 1015) support for the full wikisyntax in <gallery> captions.
 144 * (bug 1105) A "Destination filename" (save as) added to Special:Upload Upload.
 145 * (bug 1352) Images on description pages now get thumbnailed regardless of whether the thumbnail is larger than the original.
 146 * (bug 1662) A new magicword, {{CURRENTMONTHABBREV}} returns the abbreviation of the current month
 147 * (bug 1668) 'Date format' supported for other languages than English, see:
 148   http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-March/028364.html
 149 * (bug 1739) A new magicword, {{REVISIONID}} give you the article or diff database
 150   revision id, useful for proper citation.
 151 * (bug 1998) Updated the Russian translation.
 152 * (bug 2064) Configurable JavaScript mimetype with $wgJsMimeType
 153 * (bug 2084) Fixed a regular expression in includes/Title.php that was accepting invalid syntax like #REDIRECT [[foo] in redirects
 154 * It's now possible to invert the namespace selection at Special:Allpages and Special:Contributions
 155 * No longer using sorbs.net to check for open proxies by default.
 156 * What was $wgDisableUploads is now $wgEnableUploads, and should be set to true if one wishes to enable uploads.
 157 * Supplying a reason for a block is no longer mandatory
 158 * Language conversion support for category pages
 159 * $wgStyleSheetDirectory is no longer an alias for $wgStyleDirectory;
 160 * Special:Movepage can now take paramaters like Special:Movepage/Page_to_move
 161   (used to just be able to take paramaters via a GET request like index.php?title=Special:Movepage&target=Page_to_move)
 162 * (bug 2151) The delete summary now includes editor name, if only one has edited the article.
 163 * (bug 2105) Fixed from argument to the PHP mail() function. A missing space could prevent sending mail with some versions of sendmail.
 164 * (bug 2228) Updated the Slovak translation
 165 * ...and more!
 166
 167
 168 === Changes since 1.5alpha1 ===
 169
 170 * (bug 73) Category sort key is set to file name when adding category to
 171   file description from upload page (previously it would be set to
 172   "Special:Upload", causing problems with category paging)
 173 * (bug 419) The contents of the navigation toolbar are now editable through
 174   the MediaWiki namespace on the  MediaWiki:navbar page.
 175 * (bug 498) The Views heading in MonoBook.php is now localizable
 176 * (bug 898) The wiki can now do advanced sanity check on uploaded files
 177   including virus checks using external programs.
 178 * (bug 1692) Fix margin on unwatch tab
 179 * (bug 1906) Generalize project namespace for Latin localization, update namespaces
 180 * (bug 1975) The name for Limburgish (li) changed from "Lèmburgs" to "Limburgs
 181 * (bug 2019) Wrapped the output of Special:Version in <div dir='ltr'> in order
 182   to preserve the correct flow of text on RTL wikis.
 183 * (bug 2067) Fixed crash on empty quoted HTML attribute
 184 * (bug 2075) Corrected namespace definitions in Tamil localization
 185 * (bug 2079) Removed links to Special:Maintenance from movepagetext message
 186 * (bug 2094) Multiple use of a template produced wrong results in some cases
 187 * (bug 2095) Triple-closing-bracket thing partly fixed
 188 * (bug 2110) "noarticletext" should not display on Image page for "sharedupload" media
 189 * (bug 2150) Fix tab indexes on edit form
 190 * (bug 2152) Add missing bgcolor to attribute whitelist for <td> and <th>
 191 * (bug 2176) Section edit 'show changes' button works correctly now
 192 * (bug 2178) Use temp dir from environment in parser tests
 193 * (bug 2217) Negative ISO years were incorrectly converted to BC notation
 194 * (bug 2234) allow special chars in database passwords during install
 195 * Deprecated the {{msg:template}} syntax for referring to templates, {{msg: is
 196   now the wikisyntax representation of wfMsgForContent()
 197 * Fix for reading incorrectly re-gzipped HistoryBlob entries
 198 * HistoryBlobStub: the last-used HistoryBlob is kept open to speed up
 199   multiple-revision pulls
 200 * Add $wgLegacySchemaConversion update-time option to reduce amount of
 201   copying during the schema upgrade: creates HistoryBlobCurStub reference
 202   records in text instead of copying all the cur_text fields. Requires
 203   that the cur table be left in place until/unless such fields are migrated
 204   into the main text store.
 205 * Special:Export now includes page, revision, and user id numbers by
 206   default (previously this was disabled for no particular reason)
 207 * dumpBackup.php can dump the full database to Export XML, with current
 208   revisions only or complete histories.
 209 * The group table was renamed to groups because "group" is a reserved word in
 210   SQL which caused some inconveniances.
 211 * New fileicons for c, cpp, deb, dvi, exe, h, html, iso, java, mid, mov, o,
 212   ogg, pdf, ps, rm, rpm, tar, tex, ttf and txt files based on the KDE
 213   crystalsvg theme.
 214 * Fixed a bug in Special:Newimages that made it impossible to search for '0'
 215 * Added language variant support for Icelandic, now supports "Íslenzka"
 216 * The #p-nav id in MonoBook is now #p-navigation
 217 * Putting $4 in msg:userstatstext will now give the percentage of
 218   admnistrators out of normal users.
 219 * links and brokenlinks tables merged to pagelinks; this will reduce pain
 220   dealing with moves and deletes of widely-linked pages.
 221 * Add validate table and val_ip column through the updater.
 222 * Simple rate limiter for edits and page moves; set $wgRateLimits
 223   (somewhat experimental; currently needs memcached)
 224
 225
 226 === Caveats ===
 227
 228 Some output, particularly involving user-supplied inline HTML, may not
 229 produce 100% valid or well-formed XHTML output. Testers are welcome to
 230 set $wgMimeType = "application/xhtml+xml"; to test for remaining problem
 231 cases, but this is not recommended on live sites. (This must be set for
 232 MathML to display properly in Mozilla.)
 233
 234
 235 For notes on 1.4.x and older releases, see HISTORY.
 236
 237
 238 === Online documentation ===
 239
 240 Documentation for both end-users and site administrators is currently being
 241 built up on Meta-Wikipedia, and is covered under the GNU Free Documentation
 242 License:
 243
 244   http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents
 245
 246
 247 === Mailing list ===
 248
 249 A MediaWiki-l mailing list has been set up distinct from the Wikipedia
 250 wikitech-l list:
 251
 252   http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
 253
 254 A low-traffic announcements-only list is also available:
 255   http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-announce
 256
 257 It's highly recommended that you sign up for one of these lists if you're
 258 going to run a public MediaWiki, so you can be notified of security fixes.
 259
 260
 261 === IRC help ===
 262
 263 There's usually someone online in #mediawiki on irc.freenode.net