1 = MediaWiki release notes =
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.
7 == MediaWiki 1.5 beta 1 ==
11 MediaWiki 1.5 beta 1 is a preview release, pretty much feature complete,
12 of the new 1.5 release series. There are several known and likely a number
13 of unknown bugs; it is not recommended to use this release in a production
14 environment but would be recommended for testing in mind of an upcoming
17 A number of significant changes have been made since the alpha releases,
18 including database changes and a reworking of the user permissions settings.
19 See the file UPGRADE for details of upgrading and changing your prior
20 configuration settings for the new system.
24 == MediaWiki 1.5 alpha 2 ==
28 MediaWiki 1.5 alpha 2 includes a lot of bug fixes, feature merges,
29 and a security update.
31 Incorrect handling of page template inclusions made it possible to
32 inject JavaScript code into HTML attributes, which could lead to
33 cross-site scripting attacks on a publicly editable wiki.
35 Vulnerable releases and fix:
36 * 1.5 prerelease: fixed in 1.5alpha2
37 * 1.4 stable series: fixed in 1.4.5
38 * 1.3 legacy series: fixed in 1.3.13
39 * 1.2 series no longer supported; upgrade to 1.4.5 strongly recommended
42 == MediaWiki 1.5 alpha 1 ==
46 This is a testing preview release, being put out mainly to aid testers in
47 finding installation bugs and other major problems. It is strongly recommended
48 NOT to run a live production web site on this alpha release.
50 ** WARNING: USE OF THIS ALPHA RELEASE MAY INFEST YOUR HOUSE WITH **
51 ** TERMITES, ROT YOUR TEETH, GROW HAIR ON YOUR PALMS, AND PASTE **
52 ** INNUENDO INTO YOUR C.V. RIGHT BEFORE A JOB INTERVIEW! **
53 ** DON'T SAY WE DIDN'T WARN YOU, MAN. WE TOTALLY DID RIGHT HERE. **
59 The core table schema has changed significantly. This should make better
60 use of the database's cache and disk I/O, and make significantly speed up
61 rename and delete operations on pages with very long edit histories.
63 Unfortunately this does mean upgrading a wiki of size from 1.4 will require
64 some downtime for the schema restructuring, but future storage backend
65 changes should be able to integrate into the new system more easily.
68 The current revision of a page now has a permanent 'oldid' number assigned
69 immediately, and the id numbers are now preserved across deletion/undeletion.
70 A permanent reference to the current revision of a page is now just a matter
71 of going to the 'history' tab and copying the first link in the list.
74 Renames of pages are now recorded in Special:Log and the page history.
75 A handy revert link is available from the log for sysops.
78 Ever lost track of what you'd done so far during an edit? A 'Show diff'
79 button on the edit page now makes it easy to remember.
82 It's now possible to specify the final filename of an upload distinct
83 from the original filename on your disk.
85 An image link for a missing file will now take you straight to the upload page.
87 More metadata is pre-extracted from uploaded images, which will ease pressure
88 on disk or NFS volumes used to store images. EXIF metadata is displayed on
89 the image description page if PHP is configured with the necessary module.
92 There are some changes to the user permissions system, with assignable
93 groups. This is still somewhat in flux; do not rely on the present system
94 that you see in this alpha to still be there.
97 User-to-user e-mail can now be restricted to require a mail-back confirmation
98 first to reduce potential for abuse with false addresses.
100 Updates to user talk pages and watchlist entries can optionally send e-mail
104 A somewhat experimental interface for hooking in an external editor
105 application is included. This may not be on by default in final release,
106 depending on support.
109 A bunch of stuff we forgot to mention.
115 Wikis must now be encoded in Unicode UTF-8; this has been the default for
116 some time, but some languages could optionally be installed in Latin-1 mode.
117 This is no longer supported.
120 Some optimization hacks for MySQL 3.x have been removed as part of the schema
121 clean-up (specifically, the inverse_timestamp fields). MediaWiki 1.5 should
122 still run, but wikis of significant size should very seriously consider
123 upgrading to a more modern release. MySQL 3.x support will probably be
124 entirely dropped in the next major release later this year.
127 These tools were, ironically enough, not really maintained. This special
128 page has been removed; insofar as some of its pieces were useful and haven't
129 already been supplanted by other special pages they should be rewritten in
130 an efficient and safe manner in the future.
133 === What's still waiting? ===
135 These things should be fixed by the time 1.5.0 final is released:
138 Wikis in Latin-1 encoding are no longer supported; only Unicode UTF-8.
139 A new option $wgLegacyEncoding is provided to allow on-the-fly recoding of
140 old page text entries, but other metadata fields (titles, comments etc) need
141 to be pre-converted. The upgrade process does not yet fully automate this.
143 In general the upgrade from 1.4 to 1.5 schema has not been tested for all
144 cases, and there may be problems.
147 The text entries of deleted pages are no longer removed from the main
148 text table on deletion. If you provide public backup dumps of your databases,
149 you will probably want to use the new XML-format dump generator... but
150 this hasn't been finished yet.
153 The table definitions for PostgreSQL install are out of date, and patches
154 to support PostgreSQL from the main installer are still pending.
157 Proper charset encoding / collation configuration for installs on MySQL 4.1
158 and higher still needs to be fiddled with. Some bits may fail on the UTF-8
159 setting due to some long field keys.
161 Authentication plugin fixes:
162 The AuthPlugin interface needs some improvements to work better with LDAP,
163 HTTP basic auth, and other such environments. Some patches are pending.
166 === Smaller changes ===
168 Various bugfixes, small features, and a few experimental things:
170 * 'live preview' reduces preview reload burden on supported browsers
171 * support for external editors for files and wiki pages:
172 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:External_editors
173 * Schema reworking: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposed_Database_Schema_Changes/October_2004
174 * (bug 15) Allow editors to view diff of their change before actually submitting an edit
175 * (bug 190) Hide your own edits on the watchlist
176 * (bug 510): Special:Randompage now works for other namespaces than NS_MAIN.
177 * (bug 1015) support for the full wikisyntax in <gallery> captions.
178 * (bug 1105) A "Destination filename" (save as) added to Special:Upload Upload.
179 * (bug 1352) Images on description pages now get thumbnailed regardless of whether the thumbnail is larger than the original.
180 * (bug 1662) A new magicword, {{CURRENTMONTHABBREV}} returns the abbreviation of the current month
181 * (bug 1668) 'Date format' supported for other languages than English, see:
182 http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-March/028364.html
183 * (bug 1739) A new magicword, {{REVISIONID}} give you the article or diff database
184 revision id, useful for proper citation.
185 * (bug 1998) Updated the Russian translation.
186 * (bug 2064) Configurable JavaScript mimetype with $wgJsMimeType
187 * (bug 2084) Fixed a regular expression in includes/Title.php that was accepting invalid syntax like #REDIRECT [[foo] in redirects
188 * It's now possible to invert the namespace selection at Special:Allpages and Special:Contributions
189 * No longer using sorbs.net to check for open proxies by default.
190 * What was $wgDisableUploads is now $wgEnableUploads, and should be set to true if one wishes to enable uploads.
191 * Supplying a reason for a block is no longer mandatory
192 * Language conversion support for category pages
193 * $wgStyleSheetDirectory is no longer an alias for $wgStyleDirectory;
194 * Special:Movepage can now take paramaters like Special:Movepage/Page_to_move
195 (used to just be able to take paramaters via a GET request like index.php?title=Special:Movepage&target=Page_to_move)
196 * (bug 2151) The delete summary now includes editor name, if only one has edited the article.
197 * (bug 2105) Fixed from argument to the PHP mail() function. A missing space could prevent sending mail with some versions of sendmail.
198 * (bug 2228) Updated the Slovak translation
202 === Changes since 1.5alpha1 ===
204 * (bug 73) Category sort key is set to file name when adding category to
205 file description from upload page (previously it would be set to
206 "Special:Upload", causing problems with category paging)
207 * (bug 419) The contents of the navigation toolbar are now editable through
208 the MediaWiki namespace on the MediaWiki:navbar page.
209 * (bug 498) The Views heading in MonoBook.php is now localizable
210 * (bug 898) The wiki can now do advanced sanity check on uploaded files
211 including virus checks using external programs.
212 * (bug 1692) Fix margin on unwatch tab
213 * (bug 1906) Generalize project namespace for Latin localization, update namespaces
214 * (bug 1975) The name for Limburgish (li) changed from "Lèmburgs" to "Limburgs
215 * (bug 2019) Wrapped the output of Special:Version in <div dir='ltr'> in order
216 to preserve the correct flow of text on RTL wikis.
217 * (bug 2067) Fixed crash on empty quoted HTML attribute
218 * (bug 2075) Corrected namespace definitions in Tamil localization
219 * (bug 2079) Removed links to Special:Maintenance from movepagetext message
220 * (bug 2094) Multiple use of a template produced wrong results in some cases
221 * (bug 2095) Triple-closing-bracket thing partly fixed
222 * (bug 2110) "noarticletext" should not display on Image page for "sharedupload" media
223 * (bug 2150) Fix tab indexes on edit form
224 * (bug 2152) Add missing bgcolor to attribute whitelist for <td> and <th>
225 * (bug 2176) Section edit 'show changes' button works correctly now
226 * (bug 2178) Use temp dir from environment in parser tests
227 * (bug 2217) Negative ISO years were incorrectly converted to BC notation
228 * (bug 2234) allow special chars in database passwords during install
229 * Deprecated the {{msg:template}} syntax for referring to templates, {{msg: is
230 now the wikisyntax representation of wfMsgForContent()
231 * Fix for reading incorrectly re-gzipped HistoryBlob entries
232 * HistoryBlobStub: the last-used HistoryBlob is kept open to speed up
233 multiple-revision pulls
234 * Add $wgLegacySchemaConversion update-time option to reduce amount of
235 copying during the schema upgrade: creates HistoryBlobCurStub reference
236 records in text instead of copying all the cur_text fields. Requires
237 that the cur table be left in place until/unless such fields are migrated
238 into the main text store.
239 * Special:Export now includes page, revision, and user id numbers by
240 default (previously this was disabled for no particular reason)
241 * dumpBackup.php can dump the full database to Export XML, with current
242 revisions only or complete histories.
243 * The group table was renamed to groups because "group" is a reserved word in
244 SQL which caused some inconveniances.
245 * New fileicons for c, cpp, deb, dvi, exe, h, html, iso, java, mid, mov, o,
246 ogg, pdf, ps, rm, rpm, tar, tex, ttf and txt files based on the KDE
248 * Fixed a bug in Special:Newimages that made it impossible to search for '0'
249 * Added language variant support for Icelandic, now supports "Íslenzka"
250 * The #p-nav id in MonoBook is now #p-navigation
251 * Putting $4 in msg:userstatstext will now give the percentage of
252 admnistrators out of normal users.
253 * links and brokenlinks tables merged to pagelinks; this will reduce pain
254 dealing with moves and deletes of widely-linked pages.
255 * Add validate table and val_ip column through the updater.
256 * Simple rate limiter for edits and page moves; set $wgRateLimits
257 (somewhat experimental; currently needs memcached)
258 * (bug 2262) Hide math preferences when TeX is not enabled
259 * (bug 2267) Don't generate thumbnail at the same size as the source image.
260 * Fix rebuildtextindex.inc for new schema
261 * Remove linkscc table code, no longer used.
262 * (bug 2271) Use faster text-only link replacement in image alt text
263 instead of rerunning expensive link lookup and HTML generation.
264 * Only build the HTML attribute whitelist tree once.
265 * Replace wfMungeToUtf8 and do_html_entity_decode with a single function
266 that does both numeric and named chars: Sanitizer::decodeCharReferences
267 * Removed some obsolete UTF-8 converter functions
268 * Fix function comment in debug dump of SQL statements
269 * (bug 2275) Update search index more or less right on page move
270 * (bug 2053) Move comment whitespace trimming from edit page to save;
271 leaves the whitespace from the section comment there on preview.
272 * (bug 2274) Respect stub threshold in category page list
273 * (bug 2173) Fatal error when removing an article with an empty title from the watchlist
274 * Removed -f parameter from mail() usage, likely to cause failures and bounces.
275 * (bug 2130) Fixed interwiki links with fragments
276 * (bug 684) Accept an attribute parameter array on parser hook tags
277 * (bug 814) Integrate AuthPlugin changes to support Ryan Lane's external
278 LDAP authentication plugin
279 * (bug 2034) Armor HTML attributes against template inclusion and links munging
281 === Changes since 1.5alpha2 ===
283 * (bug 2319) Fix parse hook tag matching
284 * (bug 2329) Fix title formatting in several special pages
285 * (bug 2223) Add unique index on user_name field to prevent duplicate accounts
286 * (bug 1976) fix shared user database with a table prefix set
287 * (bug 2334) Accept null for attribs in wfElement without PHP warning
288 * (bug 2309) Allow templates and template parameters in HTML attribute zone,
289 with proper validation checks. (regression from fix for 2304)
290 * Disallow close tags and enforce empty tags for <hr> and <br>
291 * Changed user_groups format quite a bit.
292 * (bug 2368) Avoid fatally breaking PHP 4.1.2 in a debug line
293 * (bug 2367) Insert correct redirect link record on page move
294 * (bug 2372) Fix rendering of empty-title inline interwiki links
295 * (bug 2384) Fix typo in regex for IP address checking
296 * (bug 650) Prominently link MySQL 4.1 help page in installer if a possible
297 version conflict is detected
298 * (bug 2394) Undo incompatible breakage to {{msg:}} compatiblity includes
299 * (bug 1322) Use a shorter cl_sortkey field to avoid breaking on MySQL 4.1
300 when the default charset is set to utf8
301 * (bug 2400) don't send confirmation mail on account creation if
302 $wgEmailAuthentication is false.
303 * (bug 2172) Fix problem with nowiki beeing replaced by marker strings
304 when a template with a gallery was used.
305 * Guard Special:Userrights against form submission forgery
306 * (bug 2408) page_is_new was inverted (whoops!)
307 * Added wfMsgHtml() function for escaping messages and leaving params intact
308 * Fix ordering of Special:Listusers; fix groups list so it shows all groups
309 when searching for a specific group and can't be split across pages
310 * (bug 1702) Display a handy upload link instead of a useless blank link
311 for [[media:]] links to nonexistent files.
312 * (bug 873) Fix usage of createaccount permission; replaces $wgWhitelistAccount
313 * (bug 1805) Initialise $wgContLang before $wgUser
314 * (bug 2277) Added Friulian language file
315 * (bug 2457) The "Special page" href now links to the current special page
317 * (bug 1120) Updated the Czech translation
318 * A new magic word, {{SCRIPTPATH}}, returns $wgScriptPath
319 * A new magic word, {{SERVERNAME}}, returns $wgServerName
320 * A new magic word, {{NUMBEROFFILES}}, returns the number of rows in the image table
321 * Special:Imagelist displays titles with " " instead of "_"
322 * Less gratuitous munging of content sample in delete summary
323 * badaccess/badaccesstext to supercede sysop*, developer* messages
324 * Changed $wgGroupPermissions to more cut-n-paste-friendly format
325 * 'developer' group deprecated by default
326 * Special:Upload now uses 'upload' permission instead of hardcoding login check
327 * Add 'importupload' permission to disable direct uploads to Special:Import
328 * (bug 2459) Correct escaping in Special:Log prev/next links
329 * (bug 2462 etc) Taking out the experimental dash conversion; it broke too many
330 things for the current parser to handle cleanly
331 * (bug 2467) Added a Turkish language file
332 * Fixed a bug in Special:Contributions that caused the namespace selection to
333 be forgotten between submits
334 * Special:Watchlist/edit now has namespace subheadings
335 * (bug 1714) the "Save page" button now has right margin to seperate it from
336 "Show preview" and "Show changes"
337 * Special:Statistics now supports action=raw, useful for bots designed to
338 harwest e.g. article counts from multiple wikis.
339 * The copyright confirmation box at Special:Upload is now turned off by default
340 and can be turned back on by setting $wgCopyrightAffirmation to a true value.
341 * Restored prior text for password reminder button and e-mail, replacing
342 the factually inaccurate text that was there.
343 * (bug 2178) Fix temp dir check again
344 * (bug 2488) Format 'deletedtext' message as wikitext
345 * (bug 750) Keep line endings consistent in LocalSettings.php
346 * (bug 1577) Add 'printable version' tab in MonoBook for people who don't
347 realize you can just hit print to get a nicely formatted printable page.
348 * Trim whitespace from option values to weather line-ending corruption problems
349 * Fixed a typo in the Romanian language file (NS_MESIA => NS_MEDIA)
350 * (bug 2504) Updated the Finnish translation
351 * (bug 2506, 2512) Updated the Nynorsk translation
352 * (bug 996) Replace $wgWhitelistEdit with 'edit' permission; fixup UPGRADE
353 documentation about edit and read whitelists.
354 * (bug 2515) Fix incremental link table update
355 * Removed some wikipedia-specifica from LanguageXx.php's
356 * (bug 2496) Allow MediaWiki:edithelppage to point to external page
357 * Added a versionRequired() function to OutputPage, useful for extension
358 writers that want to control what version of MediaWiki their extension
360 * Serialized user objects now checked for versioning
361 * Fix for interwiki link regression
362 * Printable link shorter in monobook
363 * Experimental Latin-1-and-replication-friendly upgrader script
364 * (bug 2520) Don't show enotif options when disabled
366 == Changes since 1.5beta1 ==
367 * (bug 2531) Changed the interwiki name for sh (Serbocroatian) to
368 Srpskohrvatski/Српскохрватски (was Српскохрватски (Srbskohrvatski))
369 * Nonzero return code for command-line scripts on wfDebugDieBacktrace()
370 * Conversion fix for empty old table in upgrade1_5.php
371 * Try reading revisions from master if no result on slave
372 * (bug 2538) Suppress notice on user serialized checks
373 * Fix paging on Special:Contributions
374 * (bug 2541) Fix unprotect tab
379 Some output, particularly involving user-supplied inline HTML, may not
380 produce 100% valid or well-formed XHTML output. Testers are welcome to
381 set $wgMimeType = "application/xhtml+xml"; to test for remaining problem
382 cases, but this is not recommended on live sites. (This must be set for
383 MathML to display properly in Mozilla.)
386 For notes on 1.4.x and older releases, see HISTORY.
389 === Online documentation ===
391 Documentation for both end-users and site administrators is currently being
392 built up on Meta-Wikipedia, and is covered under the GNU Free Documentation
395 http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents
400 A MediaWiki-l mailing list has been set up distinct from the Wikipedia
403 http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
405 A low-traffic announcements-only list is also available:
406 http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-announce
408 It's highly recommended that you sign up for one of these lists if you're
409 going to run a public MediaWiki, so you can be notified of security fixes.
414 There's usually someone online in #mediawiki on irc.freenode.net