RELEASE-NOTES

   1 = MediaWiki release notes =
   2
   3 == Version 1.2.0rc1, 2004-02-28 ==
   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 * Editing toolbar to demonstrate wiki syntax to newbies
  22   (off by default in user preferences)
  23 * Support for authenticated SMTP outgoing e-mail (experimental)
  24
  25 Fixes and tweaks:
  26 * Should work out of the box on MySQL 3.2.x again. On 4.x set
  27   $wgEnablePersistentLC = true; to turn on the link cache table
  28   for a slight rendering speed boost.
  29 * Works with short tags disabled.
  30 * Various bug fixes.
  31 * Other stuff we forgot.
  32 * Documentation more out of date than ever before!
  33
  34 === Behavior changes ===
  35
  36 * wiki.phtml and redirect.phtml are now renamed to index.php and redirect.php
  37   The old names are provided too for compatibility, but make sure they don't
  38   conflict if you've been putting other files in your wiki.
  39 * Uploaded filenames are more strictly checked than before. See bits in
  40   DefaultSettings.php to tweak this behavior to your needs.
  41 * Database messages are now enabled by default, so the interface messages can
  42   be tweaked through the wiki with a sysop account. Disable this if you
  43   don't want the performance hit.
  44
  45 === Database changes ===
  46
  47 An index was added to recentchanges table to speed up Newpages
  48 (patch-rc-newindex.sql for manual updaters).
  49
  50 Expiration date field has been added to ipblocks table
  51 (patch-ipb_expiry.sql for manual updaters).
  52
  53
  54 == Version 1.1.0, 2003-12-08 ==
  55
  56 This is the new production release. Any following 1.1.x releases are expected
  57 to contain only bug fixes; developments of new features will go towards a 1.2.0
  58 release.
  59
  60 New features in 1.1:
  61 * New wiki table syntax:
  62   http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide:_Using_tables
  63 * User-editable interface messages:
  64   http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_namespace
  65 * XML-wrapped page source export with optional history:
  66   http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_import_and_export
  67   (There is not yet an import function!)
  68 * "Magic words"
  69
  70 Fixes and tweaks:
  71 * linkscc table caches link data for rendering; faster rebuildlinks.php
  72 * Numerous bugs in Cologne Blue skin fixed
  73 * Login gives warning about missing cookies
  74 * Block log, protection log added; deletion log now includes undeletions
  75 * Deletion & upload logs now escape comment text properly
  76 * Problems with <nowiki> segments in section titles etc mitigated
  77 * Contributions offset and minor edit bugs fixed
  78 * Whatlinkshere now sorted alphabetically
  79 * Various exciting new profiling options.
  80 * Debug log is off by default.
  81 * Various small bugs fixed.
  82
  83 Internal changes:
  84 * wfQuery has had a second parameter inserted, DB_READ or DB_WRITE. This value
  85   is not actually used so far.
  86 * Partial code for categories and Smarty template-based skins is in the tree
  87   but disabled.
  88 * Parts of Article.php have been moved to EditPage.php and ImagePage.php.
  89
  90 New translations:
  91 * fi - Finnish
  92 * ia - Interlingua
  93 * no - Norwegian
  94 * sk - Slovak
  95 * ta - Tamil
  96
  97 === Database changes ===
  98
  99 "linkscc" table added. If upgrading manually (rather than with update.php),
 100 run maintenance/archives/patch-linkscc.sql to create the table.
 101
 102 Older releases were dated snapshots from the old 'stable' branch:
 103
 104 == mediawiki-20031118 ==
 105
 106 * Image deletion fixed.
 107 * Deletion of image old revisions now restricted to sysops
 108   (this is an irreversible action and not well logged)
 109 * Fixed maintenance scripts broken by last release's security fix
 110 * Many errors in rebuildlinks script fixed.
 111
 112 == mediawiki-20031117 ==
 113
 114 * SECURITY FIX: stricter checking of include path
 115 * Fixed user contributions next/prev bug
 116 * Login cookies now have the database name prefixed to allow wikis
 117   to coexist in the same domain. This will invalidate any old saved
 118   password cookies.
 119 * Update cache timestamp when talk pages are created
 120 * Saving the login form in Mozilla no longer blanks password in prefs.
 121 * Check existence of source page before performing a move.
 122 * Detect invalid titles in Special:Allpages
 123 * Q-encode headers on outgoing inter-user e-mail
 124 * Updates to some translations.
 125 * Added table of contents border/bg to Cologne Blue, Nostalgia skins
 126 * Protected pages no longer appear unprotected when visited via redirect
 127 * Swapped old Wikipedia logo for the MediaWiki sunflower logo
 128 * install.php, update.php print warning on old PHP versions,
 129   added compatibility functions that might or might not help
 130
 131 No database changes since 20031107; upgrading should be clean.
 132
 133
 134 == mediawiki-20031107 ==
 135
 136 * Fixed various bugs!
 137 * Some speed improvements from tweaks to the table indexes
 138 * Limited support for memcached (see below)
 139 * New translations (see below)
 140 * Interwiki link data now kept in database for flexibility
 141 * Friendlier read-only source view if asked to edit a page when
 142   the db is locked or the page is protected.
 143 * Normal IP blocks auto-expire after 24 hours
 144 * Optional support for blocking usernames
 145 * Uploads disabled by default (see below)
 146
 147
 148 === Security note ===
 149
 150 Uploads are now disabled by default. If you've set up a secure configuration
 151 you can reenable uploads by putting:
 152
 153   $wgDisableUploads = false;
 154
 155 into LocalSettings.php.
 156
 157 Earlier versions of MediaWiki included a bug that potentially allows logged-
 158 in users to delete arbitrary files in directories writable by the web server
 159 user by manually feeding false form data; this is now fixed.
 160
 161 As a reminder, disable PHP script execution in the upload directory!
 162 You may also wish to serve HTML pages as plaintext to prevent cookie-
 163 stealing JavaScript attacks. Example Apache config fragment:
 164
 165   <Directory "/Library/MediaWiki/web/upload">
 166      # Ignore .htaccess files
 167      AllowOverride None
 168
 169      # Serve HTML as plaintext
 170      AddType text/plain .html .htm .shtml
 171
 172      # Don't run arbitrary PHP code.
 173      php_admin_flag engine off
 174
 175      # If you've other scripting languages, disable them too.
 176   </Directory>
 177
 178
 179 === Database updates ===
 180
 181 If you're using update.php, the necessary database changes should
 182 be made automatically.
 183
 184 To manually upgrade your database from the 2003-08-29 release, run the
 185 following SQL scripts from the maintenance subdirectory:
 186
 187   archives/patch-ipblocks.sql
 188   archives/patch-interwiki.sql
 189   archives/patch-indexes.sql
 190   interwiki.sql
 191
 192 To copy in the Wikipedia language-prefix interwikis as well, add:
 193
 194   wikipedia-interwiki.sql
 195
 196
 197 === Translations ===
 198
 199 New interface localization files are included for:
 200   fy Frisian
 201   ro Romanian
 202   sl Slovene
 203   sq Albanian
 204   sr Serbian
 205
 206
 207 === Memcached ===
 208
 209 Memcached is a distributed cache system. See http://www.danga.com/memcached/
 210 MediaWiki can optionally use memcached to store some data between calls
 211 to reduce load on the database. Currently this is limited to user and
 212 talk page notification data, interwiki prefix/URL matches, and the
 213 UTF-8 conversion tables.
 214
 215 MediaWiki includes version 1.0.10 of the (GPL'd) PHP memcached client by
 216 Ryan Gilfether; if memcached is disabled it acts as a dummy object with
 217 minimal overhead.
 218
 219 To use memcached you'll need PHP installed with sockets support (this is not
 220 in the default configure options). See docs/memcached for some more details.
 221
 222 Additionally, you can store login session data in memcached instead of the
 223 local filesystem, which can help to enable load-balancing by letting login
 224 sessions transparently work on multiple front-end web servers. (The primary
 225 other issue is with uploads, which requires some care in handling.)
 226
 227 To enable this, set $wgSessionsInMemcached = true; and set $wgCookieDomain
 228 appropriately if exposing multiple hostnames. This system is new and may be
 229 volatile; login sessions will fail dramatically if memcached is unavailable
 230 when this option is turned on.
 231
 232
 233 === Online documentation ===
 234
 235 Documentation for both end-users and site administrators is currently being
 236 built up on Meta-Wikipedia, and is covered under the GNU Free Documentation
 237 License:
 238
 239   http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide
 240
 241
 242 === Mailing list ===
 243
 244 A MediaWiki-l mailing list has been set up distinct from the Wikipedia
 245 wikitech-l list:
 246
 247   http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
 248
 249
 250 === UseModWiki import script ===
 251
 252 A stripped-down UseModWiki import script is available in the maintenance
 253 subdirectory. It is incomplete and requires a lot of manual clean-up, but
 254 does function for the brave and pure of heart.
 255
 256
 257 === Test suite removed ===
 258
 259 The unmaintained Java-based test suite has been removed from the tarball
 260 release. If you really want it you can check it out from CVS.
 261
 262
 263 == mediawiki-20030829 ==
 264
 265 First release under MediaWiki name.