= MediaWiki release notes =
-== Version 1.3.0pre-alpha ==
-
-Look & layout:
-* New default layout 'MonoBook'
-* Print stylesheet now built-in to every page
-* More or less correct XHTML 1.0 (served as text/html by default)
-
-Wiki features:
-* Image captions can now include links and other basic formatting
-* Image bounding box can be specified instead of width, e.g. as
- 100x100px, making the image not wider than 100px and not higher
- than 100px, keeping aspect ratio.
-* Templates have been expanded with parameters, and separated from
- the MediaWiki: localization scheme.
-* Categories more or less work
-
-Editing:
-* Automatic merging of edit conflicts that don't directly interfere
-* Edit summaries can now include basic formatting and links
-
-Metadata and output:
-* Linked Creative Commons copyright metadata (optional)
-* RSS 2.0 feeds for Recent Changes, New Pages
-
-Optional modules:
-* WikiHiero hieroglyphic module can be added (separate download)
-* Timeline module can be added (separate download).
- Requires ploticus.
-* TeX now has an experimental MathML output mode (incomplete)
-
-Installation and upgrading:
-* The old install.php and update.php have been removed. In-place
- installation introduced in 1.2 is now the standard installation
- and upgrade method, see INSTALL for directions.
-
-Database:
-* The links table has been changed to use a cur_id for l_from.
- The link tables must be converted on upgrade, which may entail
- some downtime.
-
-Code and compatibility:
-* Should now run clean with error reporting set to E_ALL.
-* register_globals hack from 1.2 has been replaced with safer code
-* Bundled PHPTAL 0.7.0 from http://phptal.sourceforge.net/
- (with some patches)
-* Most image-related code moved to Image.php
-* More fixes for PHP 4.1.2 (thanks to Asheesh Laroia)
-* URL encoding fix for anchors
+Security reminder: MediaWiki does not require PHP's register_globals
+setting since version 1.2.0. If you have it on, turn it *off* if you can.
+
+
+== 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 ===
MathML to display properly in Mozilla.)
-== Version 1.2.5, 2004-05-01 ==
-* Fixed install problem with blank root password
-* Fixed Special:Emailuser/Username links
-* Fixed main-page edit links on fuzzy search results
-* Fixed wikipedia-interwiki.sql
-* Fixed install with apache2filter (ugly URLs)
-* IP in 'go' search brings up contributions
-* Switch from broken & to ? on top-level wiki URL hack
-
-== Version 1.2.4, 2004-04-13 ==
-
-* Fixed edit toolbar in Mozilla
-* Diff links in Contributions for 'top' edits
-* Fixed Nostalgia skin drop-down for register_globals off
-* Backported optional open proxy blocker
-* Backported $wgWhitelistRead
-* $wgCapitalLinks option to force full case sensitivity in titles
-* Cleaned up error handling when can't talk to database
-* Disabled unsafe command-line installer (remove the "die()" call to use)
-
-== Version 1.2.3, 2004-04-02 ==
-
-* Fixed an in-place install bug with non-root MySQL user
-* Fixed history diff checkboxes bug on titles with ampersands
-* Fixed printable link bug on special pages with parameters
-* Fixed bug that broke IP blocking w/o memcached
-* Turns off E_NOTICE warnings if PHP settings have them on
- (you can grope in and turn this off if you like to debug)
-
-== Version 1.2.2, 2004-03-28 ==
-
-* Fixed an upgrade bug introduced in 1.2.1.
-* Disabled $wgUseCategoryMagic, which feature is incomplete broken
-
-== Version 1.2.1, 2004-03-27 ==
-
-Installation, compatibility, security fixlets:
-* Detect use of PHP as CGI and disable index.php/Title URLs
-* Try to auto-create math tmp & output directories if not present
-* Disable Asksql in default install ($wgAllowSysopQueries)
-* Better handling of get_magic_quotes_gpc (apostrophe problems)
-* French localisation no longer hard-codes "Wikipedia" name
-
-== Version 1.2.0 ==
-
-New features in 1.2:
-* Image resizing/thumbnail generation
-* Stricter upload file extension blacklist and whitelist options
-* More flexible blocking system; time period may be set
-* Handier sysop account management. An account marked "bureaucrat"
- may assign sysop access to other accounts via Special:Makesysop.
- (The exact details of this may change in the future)
-* Support for a squid cache with explicit purging of cached anon pages
-* Optional compression of old revision text (requires zlib support)
-* Fuzzy title search (experimental, requires memcached)
-* Page rendering cache (experimental)
-* Editing toolbar to demonstrate wiki syntax to newbies
- (off by default in user preferences)
-* Support for authenticated SMTP outgoing e-mail (experimental)
-* It's now possible to assign sysop accounts from within the wiki.
- An account with this ability must be labeled with the "bureaucrat"
- privilege, such as the 'Developer' account created by the install.
-
-Fixes and tweaks:
-* Now works with register_globals off!
-* Works with short tags disabled.
-* Should work out of the box on MySQL 3.2.x again. On 4.x set
- $wgEnablePersistentLC = true; to turn on the link cache table
- for a slight rendering speed boost.
-* rebuildMessages.php can now selectively update new messages, or
- overwrite everything.
-* Various bug fixes.
-* Other stuff we forgot.
-* Documentation more out of date than ever before!
-
-=== Behavior changes ===
-
-* wiki.phtml and redirect.phtml are now renamed to index.php and redirect.php
- The old names are provided too for compatibility, but make sure they don't
- conflict if you've been putting other files in your wiki.
-* Uploaded filenames are more strictly checked than before. See bits in
- DefaultSettings.php to tweak this behavior to your needs.
-* Database messages are now enabled by default, so the interface messages can
- be tweaked through the wiki with a sysop account. Disable this if you
- don't want the performance hit.
-
-=== Database changes ===
-
-An index was added to recentchanges table to speed up Newpages
-(patch-rc-newindex.sql for manual updaters).
-
-Expiration date field has been added to ipblocks table
-(patch-ipb_expiry.sql for manual updaters).
-
-
-== Version 1.1.0, 2003-12-08 ==
-
-This is the new production release. Any following 1.1.x releases are expected
-to contain only bug fixes; developments of new features will go towards a 1.2.0
-release.
-
-New features in 1.1:
-* New wiki table syntax:
- http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide:_Using_tables
-* User-editable interface messages:
- http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_namespace
-* XML-wrapped page source export with optional history:
- http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_import_and_export
- (There is not yet an import function!)
-* "Magic words"
-
-Fixes and tweaks:
-* linkscc table caches link data for rendering; faster rebuildlinks.php
-* Numerous bugs in Cologne Blue skin fixed
-* Login gives warning about missing cookies
-* Block log, protection log added; deletion log now includes undeletions
-* Deletion & upload logs now escape comment text properly
-* Problems with <nowiki> segments in section titles etc mitigated
-* Contributions offset and minor edit bugs fixed
-* Whatlinkshere now sorted alphabetically
-* Various exciting new profiling options.
-* Debug log is off by default.
-* Various small bugs fixed.
-
-Internal changes:
-* wfQuery has had a second parameter inserted, DB_READ or DB_WRITE. This value
- is not actually used so far.
-* Partial code for categories and Smarty template-based skins is in the tree
- but disabled.
-* Parts of Article.php have been moved to EditPage.php and ImagePage.php.
-
-New translations:
-* fi - Finnish
-* ia - Interlingua
-* no - Norwegian
-* sk - Slovak
-* ta - Tamil
-
-=== Database changes ===
-
-"linkscc" table added. If upgrading manually (rather than with update.php),
-run maintenance/archives/patch-linkscc.sql to create the table.
-
-Older releases were dated snapshots from the old 'stable' branch:
-
-== mediawiki-20031118 ==
-
-* Image deletion fixed.
-* Deletion of image old revisions now restricted to sysops
- (this is an irreversible action and not well logged)
-* Fixed maintenance scripts broken by last release's security fix
-* Many errors in rebuildlinks script fixed.
-
-== mediawiki-20031117 ==
-
-* SECURITY FIX: stricter checking of include path
-* Fixed user contributions next/prev bug
-* Login cookies now have the database name prefixed to allow wikis
- to coexist in the same domain. This will invalidate any old saved
- password cookies.
-* Update cache timestamp when talk pages are created
-* Saving the login form in Mozilla no longer blanks password in prefs.
-* Check existence of source page before performing a move.
-* Detect invalid titles in Special:Allpages
-* Q-encode headers on outgoing inter-user e-mail
-* Updates to some translations.
-* Added table of contents border/bg to Cologne Blue, Nostalgia skins
-* Protected pages no longer appear unprotected when visited via redirect
-* Swapped old Wikipedia logo for the MediaWiki sunflower logo
-* install.php, update.php print warning on old PHP versions,
- added compatibility functions that might or might not help
-
-No database changes since 20031107; upgrading should be clean.
-
-
-== mediawiki-20031107 ==
-
-* Fixed various bugs!
-* Some speed improvements from tweaks to the table indexes
-* Limited support for memcached (see below)
-* New translations (see below)
-* Interwiki link data now kept in database for flexibility
-* Friendlier read-only source view if asked to edit a page when
- the db is locked or the page is protected.
-* Normal IP blocks auto-expire after 24 hours
-* Optional support for blocking usernames
-* Uploads disabled by default (see below)
-
-
-=== Security note ===
-
-Uploads are now disabled by default. If you've set up a secure configuration
-you can reenable uploads by putting:
-
- $wgDisableUploads = false;
-
-into LocalSettings.php.
-
-Earlier versions of MediaWiki included a bug that potentially allows logged-
-in users to delete arbitrary files in directories writable by the web server
-user by manually feeding false form data; this is now fixed.
-
-As a reminder, disable PHP script execution in the upload directory!
-You may also wish to serve HTML pages as plaintext to prevent cookie-
-stealing JavaScript attacks. Example Apache config fragment:
-
- <Directory "/Library/MediaWiki/web/upload">
- # Ignore .htaccess files
- AllowOverride None
-
- # Serve HTML as plaintext
- AddType text/plain .html .htm .shtml
-
- # Don't run arbitrary PHP code.
- php_admin_flag engine off
-
- # If you've other scripting languages, disable them too.
- </Directory>
-
-
-=== Database updates ===
-
-If you're using update.php, the necessary database changes should
-be made automatically.
-
-To manually upgrade your database from the 2003-08-29 release, run the
-following SQL scripts from the maintenance subdirectory:
-
- archives/patch-ipblocks.sql
- archives/patch-interwiki.sql
- archives/patch-indexes.sql
- interwiki.sql
-
-To copy in the Wikipedia language-prefix interwikis as well, add:
-
- wikipedia-interwiki.sql
-
-
-=== Translations ===
-
-New interface localization files are included for:
- fy Frisian
- ro Romanian
- sl Slovene
- sq Albanian
- sr Serbian
-
-
-=== Memcached ===
-
-Memcached is a distributed cache system. See http://www.danga.com/memcached/
-MediaWiki can optionally use memcached to store some data between calls
-to reduce load on the database. Currently this is limited to user and
-talk page notification data, interwiki prefix/URL matches, and the
-UTF-8 conversion tables.
-
-MediaWiki includes version 1.0.10 of the (GPL'd) PHP memcached client by
-Ryan Gilfether; if memcached is disabled it acts as a dummy object with
-minimal overhead.
-
-To use memcached you'll need PHP installed with sockets support (this is not
-in the default configure options). See docs/memcached for some more details.
-
-Additionally, you can store login session data in memcached instead of the
-local filesystem, which can help to enable load-balancing by letting login
-sessions transparently work on multiple front-end web servers. (The primary
-other issue is with uploads, which requires some care in handling.)
-
-To enable this, set $wgSessionsInMemcached = true; and set $wgCookieDomain
-appropriately if exposing multiple hostnames. This system is new and may be
-volatile; login sessions will fail dramatically if memcached is unavailable
-when this option is turned on.
+For notes on 1.4.x and older releases, see HISTORY.
=== Online documentation ===
built up on Meta-Wikipedia, and is covered under the GNU Free Documentation
License:
- http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide
+ http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents
=== Mailing list ===
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
-=== UseModWiki import script ===
-
-A stripped-down UseModWiki import script is available in the maintenance
-subdirectory. It is incomplete and requires a lot of manual clean-up, but
-does function for the brave and pure of heart.
-
-
-=== Test suite removed ===
-
-The unmaintained Java-based test suite has been removed from the tarball
-release. If you really want it you can check it out from CVS.
+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.
-== mediawiki-20030829 ==
+=== IRC help ===
-First release under MediaWiki name.
+There's usually someone online in #mediawiki on irc.freenode.net