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 1.12 ==
   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 1.12 ===
  22 * Marking edits as bot edits with Special:Contributions?bot=1 now requires the
  23   markbotedit permission, rather than the rollback permission previously used.
  24   This permission is assigned by default to the sysop group.
  25
  26 === New features in 1.12 ===
  27 * (bug 10735) Add a warning for non-descriptive filenames at Special:Upload
  28 * Add {{filepath:}} parser function to get full path to an uploaded file,
  29   complementing {{fullurl:}} for pages.
  30 * (bug 11136) If using Postgres, search path is explicitly set if wgDBmwschema is
  31   not set to 'mediawiki', allowing multiple mediawiki instances per user.
  32 * (bug 11151) Add descriptive <title> to revision history page
  33 * (bug 5412) Add feed links for the site to all pages
  34 * (bug 11353) Add ability to retrieve raw section content via action=raw
  35 * Show relevant deletion log lines when uploading a previously deleted file
  36 * On SkinTemplate based skins (like MonoBook), omit confusing "edit"/"view source"
  37   tab entirely if the page doesn't exist and the user isn't allowed to create it
  38 * Clarify instructions given when an exception is thrown
  39 * AuthPlugin added strictUserAuth() method to allow per-user override
  40   of the strict() authentication behavior.
  41 * (bug 7872) Deleted revisions can now be viewed as diffs showing changes
  42   against the previous revision, whether currently deleted or live.
  43 * Added tooltips for the "Go" and "Search" buttons
  44 * (bug 11649) Show input form when Special:Whatlinkshere has no parameters
  45 * isValidEmailAddr hook added to User method of that name, to allow, e.g., re-
  46   stricting e-mail addresses to a specific domain
  47 * Removed "Clear" link in watchlist editor tools, as people were afraid to
  48   click it. Existing clear links will fall back to the raw editor, which is
  49   very easy to clear your watchlist with.
  50 * (bug 1405) Add wgUseNPPatrol option to control patroling for new articles
  51   on Special:Newpages
  52 * LogLine hook added to allow formatting custom entries in Special:Log.
  53 * Support for Iranian calendar
  54 * (bug 1401) Allow hiding logged-in users, bots and patrolled pages on Special:Newpages
  55 * ChangesListInsertArticleLink hook added for adding extra article info to RC.
  56 * MediaWikiPerformAction hook added for diverting control after the main
  57   globals have been set up but before any actions have been taken.
  58 * BeforeWatchlist hook added for filtering or replacing watchlist.
  59 * SkinTemplateTabAction hook added for altering the properties of tab links.
  60 * OutputPage::getRedirect public method added.
  61 * (bug 11848) Allow URL parameters 'editintro' and 'preload' in Special:Mypage
  62   and Special:Mytalk
  63 * Add ot=raw to Special:Allmessages
  64 * Support for Hebrew calendar
  65 * Support for Hebrew numerals in dates and times
  66 * (bug 11315) Signatures can be configured in [[MediaWiki:Signature]] and
  67   [[MediaWiki:Signature-anon]]
  68 * Signatures for anonymous users link to Special:Contributions page rather than user page
  69 * Added --override switch for disabled pages in updateSpecialPages.php
  70 * Provide a unique message (ipb_blocked_as_range) if unblock of a single IP fails
  71   because it is part of a blocked range.
  72 * (bug 3973) Use a separate message for the email content when an account is
  73   created by another user
  74 * dumpTextPass.php can spawn fetchText.php as a subprocess, which should restart
  75   cleanly if database connections fail unpleasantly.
  76
  77
  78 === Bug fixes in 1.12 ===
  79
  80 * Subpages are now indexed for searching properly when using PostgreSQL
  81 * (bug 3846) Suppress warnings from, e.g. open_basedir when scanning for
  82   ImageMagick, diff3 et al. during installation [patch by Jan Reininghaus]
  83 * (bug 7027) Shift handling of deletion permissions-checking to
  84   getUserPermissionsErrors.
  85 * Login and signup forms are now more correct for right-to-left languages.
  86 * (bug 5387) Block log items on RecentChanges don't make use of possible
  87   translations
  88 * (bug 11211) Pass, as a parameter to the protectedpagetext interface
  89   message, the level of protection.
  90 * (bug 9611) Supply the blocker and reason for the cantcreateaccounttext
  91   message.
  92 * (bug 8759) Fixed bug where rollback was allowed on protected pages for wikis
  93   where rollback is given to non-sysops.
  94 * (bug 8834) Split off permission for editing user JavaScript and CSS from
  95   editinterface to a new permission key editusercssjs.
  96 * (bug 11266) Set fallback language for Fulfulde (ff) to French
  97 * (bug 11179) Include image version deletion comment in public log
  98 * Fixed notice when accessing special page without read permission and whitelist
  99   is not defined
 100 * (bug 9252) Fix for tidy funkiness when using editintro mode
 101 * (bug 4021) Fix for MySQL wildcard search
 102 * (bug 10699) Fix for MySQL phrase search
 103 * (bug 11321) Fix width of gallerybox when option "width=xxx" is used
 104 * (bug 7890) Special:BrokenRedirects links deleted redirects to a non-existent page
 105 * Fix initial statistics when installing: add correct values
 106 * (bug 11342) Fix several 'returnto' links in permissions/error pages which
 107   linked to the main page instead of targetted page
 108 * Strike the link to the redirect rather than using an asterisk in Special:Listredirects
 109 * (bug 11355) Fix false positives in Safe Mode and other config detection
 110   when boolean settings are disabled with 'Off' via php_admin_value/php_value
 111 * (bug 11292) Fixed unserialize errors with Postgres by creating special Blob object.
 112 * (bug 11363) Make all metadata fields bytea when using Postgres.
 113 * (bug 11331) Add buildConcat() and use CASE not IF for DB compatibility. Make oldimage
 114   cascade delete via image table for Postgres, change fa_storage_key TEXT.
 115 * (bug 11438) Live Preview chops returned text
 116 * Show the right message on account creation when the user is blocked
 117 * (bug 11450) Fix creation of objectcache table on upgrade
 118 * Fix namespace selection after submit of Special:Newpages
 119 * Make input form of Special:Newpages nicer for RTL wikis
 120 * (bug 11462) Fix typo in LanguageGetSpecialPageAliases hook name
 121 * (bug 11474) Fix unintentional fall-through in math error handling
 122 * (bug 11478) Fix undefined method call in file deletion interface
 123 * (bug 278) Search results no longer highlight incorrect partial word matches
 124 * Compatibility with incorrectly detected old-style DJVU mime types
 125 * (bug 11560) Fix broken HTML output from weird link nesting in edit comments.
 126   Nested links (as in image caption text) still don't work _right_ but they're
 127   less wrong
 128 * (bug 9718) Remove unnecessary css from main.css causing spacing issues on
 129   some browsers.
 130 * (bug 11574) Add an interface message loginstart, which, similarly to loginend,
 131   appears just before the login form. Patch by MinuteElectron.
 132 * Do not cache category pages if using 'from' or 'until'
 133 * Created new hook getUserPermissionsErrors, to go with userCan changes.
 134 * Diff pages did not properly display css/js pages.
 135 * (bug 11620) Add call to User::isValidEmailAddr during accout creation.
 136 * (bug 11629) If $wgEmailConfirmToEdit is true, require people to supply an
 137   email address when registering.
 138 * (bug 11612) Days to show in recent changes cannot be larger than 7
 139 * (bug 11131) Change filearchive width/height columns to int for Postgres
 140 * Support plural in undeleted{revisions,revisions-files,files}
 141 * (bug 11343) If the database is read-only, ensure that undelete fails.
 142 * (bug 11690) Show revert link for page moves in Special:Log to allowed users
 143   only
 144 * Initial-lowercase prefix checks in namespaceDupes.php now actually work.
 145 * Fix regression in LinkBatch.php breaking PHP 5.0
 146 * (bug 11452) wfMsgExt uses sometimes wrong language object for parsing magic
 147   words when called with options ''parsemag'' or ''content''.
 148 * (bug 11727) Support plural in 'historysize' message
 149 * (bug 11744) Incorrect return value from Title::getParentCategories()
 150 * (bug 11762) Fix native language name of Akan (ak)
 151 * (bug 11722) Fix inconsistent case in unprotect tabs
 152 * (bug 11795) Be more paranoid about confirming accept-encoding header is present
 153 * (bug 11809) Use formatNum() for more numbers
 154 * (bug 11818) Fix native language name of Inuktitut (iu)
 155 * Remove all commas when parsing float numbers in sorted tables
 156 * Limit text field of deletion, protection and user rights changes reasons to
 157   255 characters (already restricted in the database)
 158 * In the deletion default reasons, calculate how much text to get from the
 159   article text, rather than getting 150 characters (which may be too much)
 160 * Add two messages for Special:Blockme which were used but undefined
 161 * (bug 11921) Support plural in message number_of_watching_users_pageview
 162 * If an IP address is blocked as part of a rangeblock, attempting to unblock
 163   the single IP should not unblock the entire range.
 164 * (bug 6695) Fix native language name of Southern Sotho (Sesotho) (st)
 165 * Make action=render follow redirects by default
 166 * If restricted read access was enabled, whitelist didn't work with special
 167   pages which had spaces in theirs names
 168 * If restricted read access was enabled, requests for non-existing special pages
 169   threw an exception
 170 * Feeds for recent changes now provide correct URLs for the change, not just
 171   the page
 172 * Check for if IP is blocked as part of a range when unblocking (see above bug-
 173   fix) was faulty. Now fixed.
 174 * Fixed wpReason URL parameter to action=delete.
 175 * Do not force a password for account creation by email
 176 * Ensure that rate-limiting is applied to rollbacks.
 177 * Make a better rate-limiting error message (i.e. a normal MW error,
 178   rather than an "Internal Server Error").
 179 * Do not present an image bigger than the source when 'frameless' option is used
 180   (to be consistent with the 'thumb' option now)
 181
 182 == Parser changes in 1.12 ==
 183
 184 The parser pass order has changed from
 185
 186    * Extension tag strip and render
 187    * HTML normalisation and security
 188    * Template expansion
 189    * Main section...
 190
 191 to
 192
 193    * Template and extension tag parse to intermediate representation
 194    * Template expansion and extension rendering
 195    * HTML normalisation and security
 196    * Main section...
 197
 198 The main effect of this for the user is that the rules for uncovered syntax
 199 have changed.
 200
 201 Uncovered main-pass syntax, such as HTML tags, are now generally valid, whereas
 202 previously in some cases they were escaped. For example, you could have "<ta" in
 203 one template, and "ble>" in another template, and put them together to make a
 204 valid <table> tag. Previously the result would have been "&lt;table&gt;".
 205
 206 Uncovered preprocessor syntax is generally not recognised. For example, if you
 207 have "{{a" in Template:A and "b}}" in Template:B, then "{{a}}{{b}}" will be
 208 converted to a literal "{{ab}}" rather than the contents of Template:Ab. This
 209 was the case previously in HTML output mode, and is now uniformly the case in
 210 the other modes as well. HTML-style comments uncovered by template expansion
 211 will not be recognised by the preprocessor and hence will not prevent template
 212 expansion within them, but they will be stripped by the following HTML security
 213 pass.
 214
 215 The rules for template expansion during message transformation were
 216 counterintuitive, mostly accidental and buggy. There are a few small changes in
 217 this version: for example, templates with dynamic names, as in "{{ {{a}} }}",
 218 are fully expanded as they are in HTML mode, whereas previously only the inner
 219 template was expanded. I'd like to make some larger breaking changes to message
 220 transformation, after a review of typical use cases.
 221
 222 The header identification routines for section edit and for numbering section
 223 edit links have been merged. This removes a significant failure mode and fixes a
 224 whole category of bugs (tracked by bug #4899). Wikitext headings uncovered by
 225 template expansion or comment removal will still be rendered into a heading tag,
 226 and will get an entry in the TOC, but will not have a section edit link.
 227 HTML-style headings will also not have a section edit link. Valid wikitext
 228 headings present in the template source text will get a template section edit
 229 link. This is a major break from previous behaviour, but I believe the effects
 230 are almost entirely beneficial.
 231
 232 The main motivation for making these changes was performance. The new two-pass
 233 preprocessor can skip "dead branches" in template expansion, such as unfollowed
 234 #switch cases and unused defaults for template arguments. This provides a
 235 significant performance improvement in template-heavy test cases taken from
 236 Wikipedia. Parser function hooks can participate in this performance improvement
 237 by using the new SFH_OBJECT_ARGS flag during registration.
 238
 239 The pre-expand include size limit has been removed, since there's no efficient
 240 way to calculate such a figure, and it would now be meaningless for performance
 241 anyway. The "preprocessor node count" takes its place, with a generous default
 242 limit.
 243
 244 The context in which XML-style extension tags are called has changed, so
 245 extensions which make use of the parser state may need compatibility changes.
 246
 247 === API changes in 1.12 ===
 248
 249 Full API documentation is available at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API
 250
 251 * (bug 11275) Enable descending sort in categorymembers
 252 * (bug 11308) Allow the API to output the image metadata
 253 * (bug 11296) Temporary fix for escaping of ampersands inside links in pretty-printed
 254   help document.
 255 * (bug 11405) Expand templates implementation in the API
 256 * (bug 11218) Add option to feedwatchlist to display multiple revisions for each page.
 257 * (bug 11404) Provide name of exception caught in error code field of internal api
 258   error messages.
 259 * (bug 11534) rvendid doesn't work
 260 * Fixed rvlimit of the revisions query to only enforce the lower query limit if
 261   revision content is requested.
 262 * Include svn revision number (if install is checked-out from svn) in siteinfo query.
 263 * (bug 11173) Allow limited wikicode rendering via api.php
 264 * (bug 11572) API should provide interface for expanding templates
 265 * (bug 11569) Login should return the cookie prefix
 266 * (bug 11632) Breaking change: Specify the type of a change in the recentchanges list
 267   as 'edit', 'new', 'log' instead of 0, 1, 2, respectively.
 268 * Compatibility fix for PHP 5.0.x.
 269 * Add rctype parameter to list=recentchanges that filters by type
 270 * Add apprtype and apprlevel parameters to filter list=allpages by protection types and levels
 271 * Add apdir parameter to enable listing all pages from Z to A
 272 * (bug 11721) Use a different title for results than for the help page.
 273 * (bug 11562) Added a user_registration parameter/field to the list=allusers query.
 274 * (bug 11588) Preserve document structure for empty dataset in backlinks query.
 275 * Outputting list of all user preferences rather than having to request them by name
 276 * (bug 11206) api.php should honor maxlag
 277
 278 === Languages updated in 1.12 ===
 279
 280 * Afrikaans (af)
 281 * Akan (ak) (new)
 282 * Amharic (am) (new)
 283 * Aragonese (an)
 284 * Old English (ang) (new)
 285 * Arabic (ar)
 286 * Aramaic (arc)
 287 * Mapudungun (arn) (new)
 288 * Assamese (as)
 289 * Asturian (ast)
 290 * Aymara (ay)
 291 * Samogitian (bat-smg)
 292 * Boarisch (bar)
 293 * Bikol Central (bcl)
 294 * Belarusian Taraskievica orthography (be-tarask)
 295 * Bulgarian (bg)
 296 * Bislama (bi) (new)
 297 * Bamanankan (bm)
 298 * Bengali (bn)
 299 * Bishnupriya Manipuri (bpy)
 300 * Breton (br)
 301 * Buginese (bug) (new)
 302 * Catalan (ca)
 303 * Zamboangueño (cbk-zam) (new)
 304 * Chechen (ce)
 305 * Cebuano (ceb) (new)
 306 * Czech (cs)
 307 * Cassubian (csb)
 308 * Old Church Slavonic (cu)
 309 * Welsh (cy)
 310 * Danish (da)
 311 * German (de)
 312 * Lower Sorbian (dsb) (new)
 313 * Divehi (dv)
 314 * Ewe (ee) (new)
 315 * Greek (el)
 316 * English (en)
 317 * Spanish (es)
 318 * Extremaduran (ext)
 319 * Finnish (fi)
 320 * Persian (fa)
 321 * Fulah (ff)
 322 * Võro (fiu-vro)
 323 * Faroese (fo)
 324 * French (fr)
 325 * Cajun French (frc)
 326 * Franco-Provençal (frp)
 327 * Frisian (fy)
 328 * Irish (ga)
 329 * Gön-gnŷ (gan) (new)
 330 * Galician (gl)
 331 * Gilaki (glk) (new)
 332 * Ancient Greek (grc) (new)
 333 * Swiss German (gsw)
 334 * Hakka (hak)
 335 * Hebrew (he)
 336 * Croatian (hr)
 337 * Upper Sorbian (hsb)
 338 * Hungarian (hu)
 339 * Armenian (hy)
 340 * Interlingua (ia)
 341 * Indonesian (id)
 342 * Ingush (inh) (new)
 343 * Icelandic (is)
 344 * Italian (it)
 345 * Japanese (ja)
 346 * Georgian (ka)
 347 * Kara-Kalpak (kaa)
 348 * Kabyle (kab)
 349 * Kazakh (kk)
 350 * Kannada (kn)
 351 * Korean (ko)
 352 * Kölsch (ksh)
 353 * Kurdish (Latin) (ku-latn)
 354 * Cornish (kw) (new)
 355 * Latin (la)
 356 * Luxembourgish (lb) (new)
 357 * Lak (lbe) (new)
 358 * Limbugian (li)
 359 * Lozi (loz) (new)
 360 * Lingala (ln)
 361 * Lithuanian (lt)
 362 * Malayalam (ml)
 363 * Macedonian (mk)
 364 * Malay (ms)
 365 * Erzya (myv) (new)
 366 * Nahuatl (nah)
 367 * Min-nan (nan)
 368 * Low Saxon (nds)
 369 * Dutch Low Saxon (nds-nl)
 370 * Newari (new) (new)
 371 * Dutch (nl)
 372 * Norwegian (no)
 373 * Occitan (oc)
 374 * Deitsch (pdc) (new)
 375 * Polish (pl)
 376 * Piemontèis (pms)
 377 * Pontic (pnt) (new)
 378 * Pashto (ps)
 379 * Portugese (pt)
 380 * Quechua (qu)
 381 * Rhaeto-Romance (rm) (new)
 382 * Romanian (ro)
 383 * Russian (ru)
 384 * Sakha (sah)
 385 * Sardinian (sc)
 386 * Sicilian (scn)
 387 * Sindhi (sd)
 388 * Sassarese (sdc) (new)
 389 * Seri (sei) (new)
 390 * Tachelhit (shi)
 391 * Slovak (sk)
 392 * Serbian (Cyrillic) (sr-ec)
 393 * Swati (ss) (new)
 394 * Saterland Frisian (stq) (new)
 395 * Sundanese (su)
 396 * Swedish (sv)
 397 * Tamil (ta)
 398 * Teluga (te)
 399 * Tetun (tet) (new)
 400 * Tajik (tg)
 401 * Tagalog (tl) (new)
 402 * Turkish (tr)
 403 * Tuvinian (tyv)
 404 * Uyghur (ug)
 405 * Venitian (vec)
 406 * Vietnamese (vi)
 407 * West Flemish (vls)
 408 * Volapük (vo)
 409 * Walloon (wa)
 410 * Wolof (wo)
 411 * Wu (wuu) (new)
 412 * Yiddish (yi)
 413 * Cantonese (yue)
 414 * Zhuang (za)
 415 * Zealandic (zea)
 416 * Old Chinese/Late Time Chinese (zh-classical)
 417 * Chinese (Simplified) (zh-hans)
 418 * Chinese (Traditional) (zh-hant)
 419
 420 == Compatibility ==
 421
 422 MediaWiki 1.12 requires PHP 5 (5.1 recommended). PHP 4 is no longer supported.
 423
 424 PHP 5.0.x fails on 64-bit systems due to serious bugs with array processing:
 425 http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=34879
 426 Upgrade affected systems to PHP 5.1 or higher.
 427
 428 MySQL 3.23.x is no longer supported; some older hosts may need to upgrade.
 429 At this time we still recommend 4.0, but 4.1/5.0 will work fine in most cases.
 430
 431
 432 == Upgrading ==
 433
 434 1.12 has several database changes since 1.11, and will not work without schema
 435 updates.
 436
 437 If upgrading from before 1.7, you may want to run refreshLinks.php to ensure
 438 new database fields are filled with data.
 439
 440 If you are upgrading from MediaWiki 1.4.x or earlier, some major database
 441 changes are made, and there is a slightly higher chance that things could
 442 break. Don't forget to always back up your database before upgrading!
 443
 444 See the file UPGRADE for more detailed upgrade instructions.
 445
 446
 447 === Caveats ===
 448
 449 Some output, particularly involving user-supplied inline HTML, may not
 450 produce 100% valid or well-formed XHTML output. Testers are welcome to
 451 set $wgMimeType = "application/xhtml+xml"; to test for remaining problem
 452 cases, but this is not recommended on live sites. (This must be set for
 453 MathML to display properly in Mozilla.)
 454
 455 For notes on 1.11.x and older releases, see HISTORY.
 456
 457
 458 === Online documentation ===
 459
 460 Documentation for both end-users and site administrators is currently being
 461 built up on MediaWiki.org, and is covered under the GNU Free Documentation
 462 License (except for pages that explicitly state that their contents are in
 463 the public domain) :
 464
 465   http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Documentation
 466
 467
 468 === Mailing list ===
 469
 470 A MediaWiki-l mailing list has been set up distinct from the Wikipedia
 471 wikitech-l list:
 472
 473   http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
 474
 475 A low-traffic announcements-only list is also available:
 476
 477   http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-announce
 478
 479 It's highly recommended that you sign up for one of these lists if you're
 480 going to run a public MediaWiki, so you can be notified of security fixes.
 481
 482
 483 === IRC help ===
 484
 485 There's usually someone online in #mediawiki on irc.freenode.net