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 == MediaWiki 1.14 ==
   7
   8 THIS IS NOT A RELEASE YET
   9
  10 MediaWiki is now using a "continuous integration" development model with
  11 quarterly snapshot releases. The latest development code is always kept
  12 "ready to run", and in fact runs our own sites on Wikipedia.
  13
  14 Release branches will continue to receive security updates for about a year
  15 from first release, but nonessential bugfixes and feature developments
  16 will be made on the development trunk and appear in the next quarterly release.
  17
  18 Those wishing to use the latest code instead of a branch release can obtain
  19 it from source control: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download_from_SVN
  20
  21 === Configuration changes in 1.14 ===
  22
  23 * $wgExemptFromUserRobotsControl is an array of namespaces to be exempt from
  24   the effect of the new __INDEX__/__NOINDEX__ magic words.  (Default: null, ex-
  25   empt all content namespaces.)
  26 * $wgForwardSearchUrl has been removed entirely. Documented setting since 1.4
  27   has been $wgSearchForwardUrl.
  28 * (bug 15080) $wgOverrideSiteFeed has been added. Setting either
  29   $wgSiteFeed['rss'] or 'atom' to a URL will override the default Recent Changes
  30   feed that appears on all pages.
  31 * $wgSQLiteDataDirMode has been introduced as the default directory mode for
  32   SQLite data directories on creation. Note this setting is separate from
  33   $wgDirectoryMode, which applies to all normal directories created by MediaWiki.
  34 * $wgGroupsAddToSelf and $wgGroupsRemoveFromSelf now work more like
  35   $wgAddGroups and $wgRemoveGroups, where the user must belong to a specified
  36   group in order to add or remove those groups from themselves.
  37   Backwards compatibility is maintained.
  38 * $wgRestrictDisplayTitle controls if the use of the {{DISPLAYTITLE}} magic
  39   word is restricted to titles equivalent to the actual page title. This
  40   is true per default, but can be set to false to allow any title.
  41 * $wgSpamRegex may now be an array of multiple regular expressions.
  42 * $wgAjaxSearch has been removed; use $wgEnableMWSuggest instead.
  43 * Editing the MediaWiki namespace is now unconditionally restricted to people
  44   with the editinterface right, configuring this in $wgNamespaceProtection
  45   is not required.
  46 * $wgAllowExternalImagesFrom may now be an array of multiple strings.
  47 * Introduced $wgEnableImageWhitelist to toggle the on-wiki external image
  48   whitelist on or off.
  49 * $wgProxyKey has been fully deprecated (marked as such since 1.4, never
  50   seems to have been completed). $wgSecretKey is the official documented
  51   setting now.
  52
  53 === New features in 1.14 ===
  54
  55 * New URL syntaxes for Special:ListUsers - 'Special:ListUsers/USER' and
  56   'Special:ListUsers/GROUP/USER', in addition to the older syntax
  57   'Special:ListUsers/GROUP' where GROUP is a valid group name.
  58 * Configurable per-namespace and per-page notices for the edit form,
  59   respectively MediaWiki:Editnotice-# where # is the namespace number, and
  60   MediaWiki:Editnotice-#-PAGENAME where # is the page's namespace number and
  61   PAGENAME is the page name minus the namespace prefix.
  62 * (bug 8068) New __INDEX__ and __NOINDEX__ magic words allow user control of
  63   search engine indexing on a per-article basis.
  64 * Handheld stylesheet options
  65 * Added 'DoEditSectionLink' hook as a cleaner unified version of the old
  66   'EditSectionLink' and 'EditSectionLinkForOther' hooks.  Note that the
  67   'EditSectionLinkForOther' hook has been removed, but 'EditSectionLink' is
  68   run in all cases instead, so extensions using the old hooks should still work
  69   if they ran roughly the same code for both hooks (as is almost certain).
  70 * Signature (~~~~) "cleaning", i.e. template removal, can be disabled with
  71   $wgCleanSignatures=false
  72 * Extensions can use the SkinBuildSidebar hook to modify the content of the
  73   sidebar and add custom portlets to it
  74 * Added 'MakeGlobalVariablesScript' hook for extensions to be able to add vari-
  75   ables into into the output of Skin::makeVariablesScript
  76 * (bug 13846) Added $wgAddGroups and $wgRemoveGroups display on
  77   Special:ListGroupRights
  78 * (bug 14377) Add a date selector to history pages
  79 * (bug 15007) New 'pagetitle-view-mainpage' message allows the HTML <title> of
  80   the main page to be customized
  81 * Added $wgDisableTitleConversion to disabling the conversion for all pages on
  82   the wiki
  83 * Added 'noconvertlink' toggle that can be set per user preferences, also
  84   added 'convertlink=no|yes' on GET requests whether have the link titles
  85   being converted or not
  86 * (bug 14921) Special:Contributions/: add user name to <title>
  87   Patch by Emufarmers
  88 * Unescape more "safe" characters when producing URLs, for added prettiness
  89 * Introduced a new hook 'SkinAfterContent' that allows extensions to add text
  90   after the page content and article metadata. Updated all skins and skin
  91   templates to work with that hook.
  92 * (bug 14929) removeUnusedAccounts.php now supports 'ignore-touched' and
  93   'ignore-groups'. Patch by Louperivois
  94 * (bug 15127) Work around minor display glitch in Opera.
  95 * By default, reject file uploads that look like ZIP files, to avoid the
  96   so-called GIFAR vulnerability.
  97 * (bug 15141) Give ability to only list protected pages with the cascading
  98   option enabled on Special:ProtectedPages
  99 * (bug 15157) Special:Watchlist has the same options as Special:Watchlist:
 100   Show/Hide logged in users, Show/Hide anonymous, Invert namespace selection
 101 * Added hook 'UserrightsChangeableGroups' to allow modification of what
 102   groups may be added or removed via the Special:UserRights interface.
 103 * HTML entities like &nbsp; now work (are not escaped) in edit summaries.
 104 * (bug 13815) In the comment for page moves, use the colon-separator message
 105   instead of a hardcoded colon.
 106 * Allow <gallery> to accept image names without an Image: prefix
 107 * Add tooltips to rollback and undo links
 108 * Backend upload code has been removed from SpecialUpload.php. This may cause
 109   backwards incompatibility with upload extensions.
 110 * BMP images are now displayed as PNG
 111 * (bug 13471) Added NUMBERINGROUP magic word
 112 * (bug 11884) Now support Flash EXIF attribute
 113 * Show thumbnails in the file history list, patch by User:Agbad
 114 * Added support of piped wikilinks using double-width brackets
 115 * Added an on-wiki external image whitelist. Items in this whitelist are
 116   treated as regular expression fragments to match for when possibly
 117   displaying an external image inline.
 118 * (bug 15405) Sort yen correctly in sortable tables
 119
 120 === Bug fixes in 1.14 ===
 121
 122 * (bug 14907) DatabasePostgres::fieldType now defined.
 123 * (bug 14659) Passing the default limit param to Special:Recentchanges no more
 124   falls back to the user option
 125 * (bug 14954) Fix regression in Modern and Simple skins
 126 * Recursion loop check added to Categoryfinder class
 127 * Fixed few performance troubles of large job queue processing
 128 * Not setting various parameters in Foreign Repos now fails more gracefully
 129 * (bug 2333) Redirects are properly rendered when previewing an edit.
 130 * (bug 14972) Use localized alias of Special:Search on all search forms
 131 * (bug 11035) Special:Search should have descriptive <title>
 132 * Special pages are now not subject to special handling for "self-links"
 133 * (bug 15053) Syntactically incorrect redirects with another link in them
 134   no longer redirect to the second link
 135 * (bug 15049) Fix for CheckUser extension's log search: usernames containing
 136   a "-" were incorrectly turned into bogus IP range searches.
 137   Patch by Max Semenik.
 138 * (bug 15055) Talk page notifications no longer attempt to send mail when
 139   user's e-mail address is invalid or unconfirmed
 140 * (bug 12370) Add throttle on password attempts. Defaults to max 5 attempts in 5
 141   minutes.
 142 * (bug 15016) 'Templates used on this page' list in view source should be
 143   wrapped in a div with class "templatesUsed"
 144 * (bug 14868) Setting $wgFeedDiffCutoff to 0 now disables generation of the diff
 145   entirely, not just the display of it.
 146 * (bug 6387) Introduced new setting $wgCategoryPrefixedDefaultSortkey which
 147   allows having the unprefixed page title as the default category sortkey
 148 * (bug 15079) Add class="ns-talk" / "ns-subject" to <body>. Also added
 149   ns-special to special pages.
 150 * (bug 15052) Skins should add their name as a class in <body>
 151 * (bug 14165, bug 14294) Wikimedia specific configuration in convertGrammar()
 152   for several languages was removed. The settings have been put in extension
 153   WikimediaMessages. Patch for Czech by Danny B.
 154 * (bug 15101) Displaying only bots edits in Special:Recentchanges now works
 155   again
 156 * (bug 13770) Fixed incorrect detection of PHP's DOM module
 157 * (bug 14790) Export of category pages when using Category: prefix now actually
 158   gives results
 159 * Avoid recursive crazy expansions in section edit comments for pages which
 160   contain '/*' in the title
 161 * Fix excessive memory usage when parsing pages with lots of links
 162 * $wgSpamRegex now matches the edit summary and page move descriptions in
 163   addition to body text.
 164 * Navigation links to images available from a shared repository (like Commons)
 165   from their local talk pages no longer appear as redlinks
 166 * Action=purge on ForeignApiFiles now works (purges their thumbnails and
 167   description pages).
 168 * (bug 15303) Title conversion for templates wasn't working in some cases.
 169 * (bug 15264) Underscores in Special:Search/Foo_bar parameters were taken
 170   literally; now converting them to spaces per expectation.
 171 * (bug 15342) "Invert" checkbox now works correctly when selecting main
 172   namespace in Special:Watchlist
 173 * (bug 15172) 'Go' button of Special:Recentchanges now on the same line as the
 174   last input element (like Special:Watchlist too)
 175 * (bug 15351) Fix fatal error for invalid section fragments in autocomments
 176 * Fixed intermittent deadlock errors involving objectcache table queries.
 177   Use a separate database connection for the objectcache table to avoid
 178   long-lasting locks on that table.
 179 * Respect file restrictions in the file history list
 180 * (bug 15399) Odd/even classes on sortable tables' rows could be slow for large
 181   tables, and have been disabled by default.
 182
 183
 184 === API changes in 1.14 ===
 185
 186 * Registration time of users registered before the DB field was created is now
 187   shown as empty instead of the current time.
 188 * API search now falls back to fulltext search by default when using Lucene
 189   or other engine which doesn't support a separate title search function.
 190   This means you can use API search on Wikipedia without explicitly adding
 191   &srwhat=text to the query.
 192 * Added iiprop=bitdepth to imageinfo and aiprop=bitdepth to allimages
 193 * (bug 14713) API-specific permissions (such as 'writeapi' and 'apihighlimits'
 194   are now listed on action=help
 195 * (bug 15044) Added requestid parameter to api.php to facilitate distinguishing
 196   between requests
 197 * (bug 15048) Added limit field for multivalue parameters to action=paraminfo
 198   output.
 199 * When the limit on multivalue parameters is exceeded, a warning is issued
 200 * list=search doesn't list missing pages any more
 201 * (bug 15178) Added clshow to prop=categories to allow filtering for hidden/
 202   non-hidden categories
 203 * (bug 15228) Combining revids= and redirects now throws a warning instead of an
 204   error, and still resolves redirects generated by the generator.
 205 * list={backlinks,embeddedin,imageusage} now return arrays with keys 0, 1, 2,
 206   etc. (AKA lists) instead of arrays with pageIDs as keys (AKA hash tables)
 207   for consistency with other list modules.
 208 * Added action=watch
 209 * (bug 15275) apprefix and related parameters ignore spaces at the end
 210 * action=edit no longer throws unknown error 228  when trying to create an empty
 211   section with section=new
 212 * Database replication lag doesn't cause all action=edit requests to return the
 213   nochange flag any more
 214 * (bug 15392) ApiFormatBase::formatHTML now uses $wgUrlProtocols.
 215
 216
 217 === Languages updated in 1.14 ===
 218
 219 MediaWiki supports over 300 languages. Many localisations are updated
 220 regularly. Below only new and removed languages are listed.
 221
 222 * Fiji Hindi (Devanagari script) (hif-deva)
 223 * Krio (kri)
 224 * Lezghian (lez)
 225 * Laz (lzz)
 226 * Niuean (niu)
 227 * Oromo (om)
 228 * Plautdietsch (pdt)
 229 * Tarantino (roa-tara)
 230 * Serbo-Croatian (sh)
 231
 232 == Compatibility ==
 233
 234 MediaWiki 1.14 requires PHP 5 (5.1 recommended). PHP 4 is no longer supported.
 235
 236 PHP 5.0.x fails on 64-bit systems due to serious bugs with array processing:
 237 http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=34879
 238 Upgrade affected systems to PHP 5.1 or higher.
 239
 240 MySQL 3.23.x is no longer supported; some older hosts may need to upgrade.
 241 At this time we still recommend 4.0, but 4.1/5.0 will work fine in most cases.
 242
 243
 244 == Upgrading ==
 245
 246 If upgrading from before 1.11, and you are using a wiki as a commons repository,
 247 make sure that it is updated as well. Otherwise, errors may arise due to
 248 database schema changes.
 249
 250 If upgrading from before 1.7, you may want to run refreshLinks.php to ensure
 251 new database fields are filled with data.
 252
 253 If you are upgrading from MediaWiki 1.4.x or earlier, some major database
 254 changes are made, and there is a slightly higher chance that things could
 255 break. Don't forget to always back up your database before upgrading!
 256
 257 See the file UPGRADE for more detailed upgrade instructions.
 258
 259
 260 === Caveats ===
 261
 262 Some output, particularly involving user-supplied inline HTML, may not
 263 produce 100% valid or well-formed XHTML output. Testers are welcome to
 264 set $wgMimeType = "application/xhtml+xml"; to test for remaining problem
 265 cases, but this is not recommended on live sites. (This must be set for
 266 MathML to display properly in Mozilla.)
 267
 268 For notes on 1.13.x and older releases, see HISTORY.
 269
 270
 271 === Online documentation ===
 272
 273 Documentation for both end-users and site administrators is currently being
 274 built up on MediaWiki.org, and is covered under the GNU Free Documentation
 275 License (except for pages that explicitly state that their contents are in
 276 the public domain) :
 277
 278   http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Documentation
 279
 280
 281 === Mailing list ===
 282
 283 A MediaWiki-l mailing list has been set up distinct from the Wikipedia
 284 wikitech-l list:
 285
 286   http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
 287
 288 A low-traffic announcements-only list is also available:
 289
 290   http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-announce
 291
 292 It's highly recommended that you sign up for one of these lists if you're
 293 going to run a public MediaWiki, so you can be notified of security fixes.
 294
 295
 296 === IRC help ===
 297
 298 There's usually someone online in #mediawiki on irc.freenode.net