RELEASE-NOTES

   1 = MediaWiki release notes =
   2
   3 == Version 1.2.0rc1, 2004-02-27 ==
   4
   5 This is a RELEASE CANDIDATE for the new production release. It is more or
   6 less in sync with what is running on Wikipedia right now. There may be
   7 some interesting bugs, it may eat all your data, and documentation may
   8 not be up to date. If you use this on a production site, BE CAREFUL.
   9
  10 New features in 1.2:
  11 * Image resizing/thumbnail generation
  12 * Stricter upload file extension blacklist and whitelist options
  13 * More flexible blocking system; time period may be set
  14 * Handier sysop account management. An account marked "bureaucrat"
  15   may assign sysop access to other accounts via Special:Makesysop.
  16   (The exact details of this may change in the future)
  17 * Support for a squid cache with explicit purging of cached anon pages
  18 * Optional compression of old revision text (requires zlib support)
  19 * Fuzzy title search (experimental, requires memcached)
  20 * Page rendering cache (experimental)
  21
  22 Fixes and tweaks:
  23 * Should work out of the box on MySQL 3.2.x again. On 4.x set
  24   $wgEnablePersistentLC = true; to turn on the link cache table
  25   for a slight rendering speed boost.
  26 * Various bug fixes.
  27 * Other stuff we forgot.
  28 * Documentation more out of date than ever before!
  29
  30 === IMPORTANT BEHAVIOR CHANGES: ===
  31
  32 * wiki.phtml and redirect.phtml are now installed as wiki.php and redirect.php
  33   by default. If upgrading from an old installation or doing a manual install,
  34   do check $wgScriptExtension and the $wgScript variables to make sure
  35   everything's correct one way or the other.
  36
  37 === Database changes ===
  38
  39 An index was added to recentchanges table to speed up Newpages
  40 (patch-rc-newindex.sql for manual updaters).
  41
  42 Expiration date field has been added to ipblocks table
  43 (patch-ipb_expiry.sql for manual updaters).
  44
  45
  46 == Version 1.1.0, 2003-12-08 ==
  47
  48 This is the new production release. Any following 1.1.x releases are expected
  49 to contain only bug fixes; developments of new features will go towards a 1.2.0
  50 release.
  51
  52 New features in 1.1:
  53 * New wiki table syntax:
  54   http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide:_Using_tables
  55 * User-editable interface messages:
  56   http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_namespace
  57 * XML-wrapped page source export with optional history:
  58   http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_import_and_export
  59   (There is not yet an import function!)
  60 * "Magic words"
  61
  62 Fixes and tweaks:
  63 * linkscc table caches link data for rendering; faster rebuildlinks.php
  64 * Numerous bugs in Cologne Blue skin fixed
  65 * Login gives warning about missing cookies
  66 * Block log, protection log added; deletion log now includes undeletions
  67 * Deletion & upload logs now escape comment text properly
  68 * Problems with <nowiki> segments in section titles etc mitigated
  69 * Contributions offset and minor edit bugs fixed
  70 * Whatlinkshere now sorted alphabetically
  71 * Various exciting new profiling options.
  72 * Debug log is off by default.
  73 * Various small bugs fixed.
  74
  75 Internal changes:
  76 * wfQuery has had a second parameter inserted, DB_READ or DB_WRITE. This value
  77   is not actually used so far.
  78 * Partial code for categories and Smarty template-based skins is in the tree
  79   but disabled.
  80 * Parts of Article.php have been moved to EditPage.php and ImagePage.php.
  81
  82 New translations:
  83 * fi - Finnish
  84 * ia - Interlingua
  85 * no - Norwegian
  86 * sk - Slovak
  87 * ta - Tamil
  88
  89 === Database changes ===
  90
  91 "linkscc" table added. If upgrading manually (rather than with update.php),
  92 run maintenance/archives/patch-linkscc.sql to create the table.
  93
  94 Older releases were dated snapshots from the old 'stable' branch:
  95
  96 == mediawiki-20031118 ==
  97
  98 * Image deletion fixed.
  99 * Deletion of image old revisions now restricted to sysops
 100   (this is an irreversible action and not well logged)
 101 * Fixed maintenance scripts broken by last release's security fix
 102 * Many errors in rebuildlinks script fixed.
 103
 104 == mediawiki-20031117 ==
 105
 106 * SECURITY FIX: stricter checking of include path
 107 * Fixed user contributions next/prev bug
 108 * Login cookies now have the database name prefixed to allow wikis
 109   to coexist in the same domain. This will invalidate any old saved
 110   password cookies.
 111 * Update cache timestamp when talk pages are created
 112 * Saving the login form in Mozilla no longer blanks password in prefs.
 113 * Check existence of source page before performing a move.
 114 * Detect invalid titles in Special:Allpages
 115 * Q-encode headers on outgoing inter-user e-mail
 116 * Updates to some translations.
 117 * Added table of contents border/bg to Cologne Blue, Nostalgia skins
 118 * Protected pages no longer appear unprotected when visited via redirect
 119 * Swapped old Wikipedia logo for the MediaWiki sunflower logo
 120 * install.php, update.php print warning on old PHP versions,
 121   added compatibility functions that might or might not help
 122
 123 No database changes since 20031107; upgrading should be clean.
 124
 125
 126 == mediawiki-20031107 ==
 127
 128 * Fixed various bugs!
 129 * Some speed improvements from tweaks to the table indexes
 130 * Limited support for memcached (see below)
 131 * New translations (see below)
 132 * Interwiki link data now kept in database for flexibility
 133 * Friendlier read-only source view if asked to edit a page when
 134   the db is locked or the page is protected.
 135 * Normal IP blocks auto-expire after 24 hours
 136 * Optional support for blocking usernames
 137 * Uploads disabled by default (see below)
 138
 139
 140 === Security note ===
 141
 142 Uploads are now disabled by default. If you've set up a secure configuration
 143 you can reenable uploads by putting:
 144
 145   $wgDisableUploads = false;
 146
 147 into LocalSettings.php.
 148
 149 Earlier versions of MediaWiki included a bug that potentially allows logged-
 150 in users to delete arbitrary files in directories writable by the web server
 151 user by manually feeding false form data; this is now fixed.
 152
 153 As a reminder, disable PHP script execution in the upload directory!
 154 You may also wish to serve HTML pages as plaintext to prevent cookie-
 155 stealing JavaScript attacks. Example Apache config fragment:
 156
 157   <Directory "/Library/MediaWiki/web/upload">
 158      # Ignore .htaccess files
 159      AllowOverride None
 160
 161      # Serve HTML as plaintext
 162      AddType text/plain .html .htm .shtml
 163
 164      # Don't run arbitrary PHP code.
 165      php_admin_flag engine off
 166
 167      # If you've other scripting languages, disable them too.
 168   </Directory>
 169
 170
 171 === Database updates ===
 172
 173 If you're using update.php, the necessary database changes should
 174 be made automatically.
 175
 176 To manually upgrade your database from the 2003-08-29 release, run the
 177 following SQL scripts from the maintenance subdirectory:
 178
 179   archives/patch-ipblocks.sql
 180   archives/patch-interwiki.sql
 181   archives/patch-indexes.sql
 182   interwiki.sql
 183
 184 To copy in the Wikipedia language-prefix interwikis as well, add:
 185
 186   wikipedia-interwiki.sql
 187
 188
 189 === Translations ===
 190
 191 New interface localization files are included for:
 192   fy Frisian
 193   ro Romanian
 194   sl Slovene
 195   sq Albanian
 196   sr Serbian
 197
 198
 199 === Memcached ===
 200
 201 Memcached is a distributed cache system. See http://www.danga.com/memcached/
 202 MediaWiki can optionally use memcached to store some data between calls
 203 to reduce load on the database. Currently this is limited to user and
 204 talk page notification data, interwiki prefix/URL matches, and the
 205 UTF-8 conversion tables.
 206
 207 MediaWiki includes version 1.0.10 of the (GPL'd) PHP memcached client by
 208 Ryan Gilfether; if memcached is disabled it acts as a dummy object with
 209 minimal overhead.
 210
 211 To use memcached you'll need PHP installed with sockets support (this is not
 212 in the default configure options). See docs/memcached for some more details.
 213
 214 Additionally, you can store login session data in memcached instead of the
 215 local filesystem, which can help to enable load-balancing by letting login
 216 sessions transparently work on multiple front-end web servers. (The primary
 217 other issue is with uploads, which requires some care in handling.)
 218
 219 To enable this, set $wgSessionsInMemcached = true; and set $wgCookieDomain
 220 appropriately if exposing multiple hostnames. This system is new and may be
 221 volatile; login sessions will fail dramatically if memcached is unavailable
 222 when this option is turned on.
 223
 224
 225 === Online documentation ===
 226
 227 Documentation for both end-users and site administrators is currently being
 228 built up on Meta-Wikipedia, and is covered under the GNU Free Documentation
 229 License:
 230
 231   http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide
 232
 233
 234 === Mailing list ===
 235
 236 A MediaWiki-l mailing list has been set up distinct from the Wikipedia
 237 wikitech-l list:
 238
 239   http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
 240
 241
 242 === UseModWiki import script ===
 243
 244 A stripped-down UseModWiki import script is available in the maintenance
 245 subdirectory. It is incomplete and requires a lot of manual clean-up, but
 246 does function for the brave and pure of heart.
 247
 248
 249 === Test suite removed ===
 250
 251 The unmaintained Java-based test suite has been removed from the tarball
 252 release. If you really want it you can check it out from CVS.
 253
 254
 255 == mediawiki-20030829 ==
 256
 257 First release under MediaWiki name.