RELEASE-NOTES

   1 = MediaWiki release notes =
   2
   3 == Version 1.3.0pre-alpha ==
   4
   5 Various things will be happening for 1.3.0...
   6 * More advanced parser
   7 * New schema...
   8 * Magic goodies!
   9 * stuff
  10
  11 == Version 1.2.0 ==
  12
  13 New features in 1.2:
  14 * Image resizing/thumbnail generation
  15 * Stricter upload file extension blacklist and whitelist options
  16 * More flexible blocking system; time period may be set
  17 * Handier sysop account management. An account marked "bureaucrat"
  18   may assign sysop access to other accounts via Special:Makesysop.
  19   (The exact details of this may change in the future)
  20 * Support for a squid cache with explicit purging of cached anon pages
  21 * Optional compression of old revision text (requires zlib support)
  22 * Fuzzy title search (experimental, requires memcached)
  23 * Page rendering cache (experimental)
  24 * Editing toolbar to demonstrate wiki syntax to newbies
  25   (off by default in user preferences)
  26 * Support for authenticated SMTP outgoing e-mail (experimental)
  27 * It's now possible to assign sysop accounts from within the wiki.
  28   An account with this ability must be labeled with the "bureaucrat"
  29   privilege, such as the 'Developer' account created by the install.
  30
  31 Fixes and tweaks:
  32 * Now works with register_globals off!
  33 * Works with short tags disabled.
  34 * Should work out of the box on MySQL 3.2.x again. On 4.x set
  35   $wgEnablePersistentLC = true; to turn on the link cache table
  36   for a slight rendering speed boost.
  37 * rebuildMessages.php can now selectively update new messages, or
  38   overwrite everything.
  39 * Various bug fixes.
  40 * Other stuff we forgot.
  41 * Documentation more out of date than ever before!
  42
  43 === Behavior changes ===
  44
  45 * wiki.phtml and redirect.phtml are now renamed to index.php and redirect.php
  46   The old names are provided too for compatibility, but make sure they don't
  47   conflict if you've been putting other files in your wiki.
  48 * Uploaded filenames are more strictly checked than before. See bits in
  49   DefaultSettings.php to tweak this behavior to your needs.
  50 * Database messages are now enabled by default, so the interface messages can
  51   be tweaked through the wiki with a sysop account. Disable this if you
  52   don't want the performance hit.
  53
  54 === Database changes ===
  55
  56 An index was added to recentchanges table to speed up Newpages
  57 (patch-rc-newindex.sql for manual updaters).
  58
  59 Expiration date field has been added to ipblocks table
  60 (patch-ipb_expiry.sql for manual updaters).
  61
  62
  63 == Version 1.1.0, 2003-12-08 ==
  64
  65 This is the new production release. Any following 1.1.x releases are expected
  66 to contain only bug fixes; developments of new features will go towards a 1.2.0
  67 release.
  68
  69 New features in 1.1:
  70 * New wiki table syntax:
  71   http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide:_Using_tables
  72 * User-editable interface messages:
  73   http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_namespace
  74 * XML-wrapped page source export with optional history:
  75   http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_import_and_export
  76   (There is not yet an import function!)
  77 * "Magic words"
  78
  79 Fixes and tweaks:
  80 * linkscc table caches link data for rendering; faster rebuildlinks.php
  81 * Numerous bugs in Cologne Blue skin fixed
  82 * Login gives warning about missing cookies
  83 * Block log, protection log added; deletion log now includes undeletions
  84 * Deletion & upload logs now escape comment text properly
  85 * Problems with <nowiki> segments in section titles etc mitigated
  86 * Contributions offset and minor edit bugs fixed
  87 * Whatlinkshere now sorted alphabetically
  88 * Various exciting new profiling options.
  89 * Debug log is off by default.
  90 * Various small bugs fixed.
  91
  92 Internal changes:
  93 * wfQuery has had a second parameter inserted, DB_READ or DB_WRITE. This value
  94   is not actually used so far.
  95 * Partial code for categories and Smarty template-based skins is in the tree
  96   but disabled.
  97 * Parts of Article.php have been moved to EditPage.php and ImagePage.php.
  98
  99 New translations:
 100 * fi - Finnish
 101 * ia - Interlingua
 102 * no - Norwegian
 103 * sk - Slovak
 104 * ta - Tamil
 105
 106 === Database changes ===
 107
 108 "linkscc" table added. If upgrading manually (rather than with update.php),
 109 run maintenance/archives/patch-linkscc.sql to create the table.
 110
 111 Older releases were dated snapshots from the old 'stable' branch:
 112
 113 == mediawiki-20031118 ==
 114
 115 * Image deletion fixed.
 116 * Deletion of image old revisions now restricted to sysops
 117   (this is an irreversible action and not well logged)
 118 * Fixed maintenance scripts broken by last release's security fix
 119 * Many errors in rebuildlinks script fixed.
 120
 121 == mediawiki-20031117 ==
 122
 123 * SECURITY FIX: stricter checking of include path
 124 * Fixed user contributions next/prev bug
 125 * Login cookies now have the database name prefixed to allow wikis
 126   to coexist in the same domain. This will invalidate any old saved
 127   password cookies.
 128 * Update cache timestamp when talk pages are created
 129 * Saving the login form in Mozilla no longer blanks password in prefs.
 130 * Check existence of source page before performing a move.
 131 * Detect invalid titles in Special:Allpages
 132 * Q-encode headers on outgoing inter-user e-mail
 133 * Updates to some translations.
 134 * Added table of contents border/bg to Cologne Blue, Nostalgia skins
 135 * Protected pages no longer appear unprotected when visited via redirect
 136 * Swapped old Wikipedia logo for the MediaWiki sunflower logo
 137 * install.php, update.php print warning on old PHP versions,
 138   added compatibility functions that might or might not help
 139
 140 No database changes since 20031107; upgrading should be clean.
 141
 142
 143 == mediawiki-20031107 ==
 144
 145 * Fixed various bugs!
 146 * Some speed improvements from tweaks to the table indexes
 147 * Limited support for memcached (see below)
 148 * New translations (see below)
 149 * Interwiki link data now kept in database for flexibility
 150 * Friendlier read-only source view if asked to edit a page when
 151   the db is locked or the page is protected.
 152 * Normal IP blocks auto-expire after 24 hours
 153 * Optional support for blocking usernames
 154 * Uploads disabled by default (see below)
 155
 156
 157 === Security note ===
 158
 159 Uploads are now disabled by default. If you've set up a secure configuration
 160 you can reenable uploads by putting:
 161
 162   $wgDisableUploads = false;
 163
 164 into LocalSettings.php.
 165
 166 Earlier versions of MediaWiki included a bug that potentially allows logged-
 167 in users to delete arbitrary files in directories writable by the web server
 168 user by manually feeding false form data; this is now fixed.
 169
 170 As a reminder, disable PHP script execution in the upload directory!
 171 You may also wish to serve HTML pages as plaintext to prevent cookie-
 172 stealing JavaScript attacks. Example Apache config fragment:
 173
 174   <Directory "/Library/MediaWiki/web/upload">
 175      # Ignore .htaccess files
 176      AllowOverride None
 177
 178      # Serve HTML as plaintext
 179      AddType text/plain .html .htm .shtml
 180
 181      # Don't run arbitrary PHP code.
 182      php_admin_flag engine off
 183
 184      # If you've other scripting languages, disable them too.
 185   </Directory>
 186
 187
 188 === Database updates ===
 189
 190 If you're using update.php, the necessary database changes should
 191 be made automatically.
 192
 193 To manually upgrade your database from the 2003-08-29 release, run the
 194 following SQL scripts from the maintenance subdirectory:
 195
 196   archives/patch-ipblocks.sql
 197   archives/patch-interwiki.sql
 198   archives/patch-indexes.sql
 199   interwiki.sql
 200
 201 To copy in the Wikipedia language-prefix interwikis as well, add:
 202
 203   wikipedia-interwiki.sql
 204
 205
 206 === Translations ===
 207
 208 New interface localization files are included for:
 209   fy Frisian
 210   ro Romanian
 211   sl Slovene
 212   sq Albanian
 213   sr Serbian
 214
 215
 216 === Memcached ===
 217
 218 Memcached is a distributed cache system. See http://www.danga.com/memcached/
 219 MediaWiki can optionally use memcached to store some data between calls
 220 to reduce load on the database. Currently this is limited to user and
 221 talk page notification data, interwiki prefix/URL matches, and the
 222 UTF-8 conversion tables.
 223
 224 MediaWiki includes version 1.0.10 of the (GPL'd) PHP memcached client by
 225 Ryan Gilfether; if memcached is disabled it acts as a dummy object with
 226 minimal overhead.
 227
 228 To use memcached you'll need PHP installed with sockets support (this is not
 229 in the default configure options). See docs/memcached for some more details.
 230
 231 Additionally, you can store login session data in memcached instead of the
 232 local filesystem, which can help to enable load-balancing by letting login
 233 sessions transparently work on multiple front-end web servers. (The primary
 234 other issue is with uploads, which requires some care in handling.)
 235
 236 To enable this, set $wgSessionsInMemcached = true; and set $wgCookieDomain
 237 appropriately if exposing multiple hostnames. This system is new and may be
 238 volatile; login sessions will fail dramatically if memcached is unavailable
 239 when this option is turned on.
 240
 241
 242 === Online documentation ===
 243
 244 Documentation for both end-users and site administrators is currently being
 245 built up on Meta-Wikipedia, and is covered under the GNU Free Documentation
 246 License:
 247
 248   http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide
 249
 250
 251 === Mailing list ===
 252
 253 A MediaWiki-l mailing list has been set up distinct from the Wikipedia
 254 wikitech-l list:
 255
 256   http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
 257
 258
 259 === UseModWiki import script ===
 260
 261 A stripped-down UseModWiki import script is available in the maintenance
 262 subdirectory. It is incomplete and requires a lot of manual clean-up, but
 263 does function for the brave and pure of heart.
 264
 265
 266 === Test suite removed ===
 267
 268 The unmaintained Java-based test suite has been removed from the tarball
 269 release. If you really want it you can check it out from CVS.
 270
 271
 272 == mediawiki-20030829 ==
 273
 274 First release under MediaWiki name.