= MediaWiki release notes =
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 1.5.2 ==
November 2, 2005
MediaWiki 1.5.2 is a bugfix maintenance release.
A change in PHP 4.4.1 and PHP 5.1.0RC broke handling of extension and
sections, causing garbage data to be inserted in output and saved
edits. This version works around the change.
Several other glitches with MySQL 5.0 and PHP 5.0.5 were also fixed;
see the change log below for a complete list.
== MediaWiki 1.5.1 ==
October 26, 2005
MediaWiki 1.5.1 is a bugfix and security maintenance release, and is a
recommended upgrade for all installations.
This release includes further corrections to the inline CSS style sanitation
which works around a JavaScript "feature" on Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Users of Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows may be vulnerable to
XSS injections on prior versions; users of standards-compliant browsers
are not vulnerable.
Major fixes include:
* Image pages work again with resizing disabled
* Works in MySQL 5.0 strict mode
There is experimental support in this release for explicitly declaring
the UTF-8 charset in the database; this has been tested with MySQL 5.0.15
but should work on 4.1 as well.
IMPORTANT: Changing this setting on an existing wiki may produce interesting
data corruption, depending on server configuration. Page contents should,
usually, be unaffected, but page titles and other items may be. Limitations
in MySQL's Unicode support mean that characters outside the BMP cannot be used
in page titles or various other fields when using this mode.
Table definitions are in maintenance/mysql5/tables.sql, and the runtime
option to send 'SET NAMES utf8' is set by $wgDBmysql5 = true.
(MySQL 3.23.x and 4.0.x do not support character set declarations; on these
versions MediaWiki simply works with UTF-8 data and MySQL is blissfully
unaware of it.)
== MediaWiki 1.5.0 final ==
October 5, 2005
MediaWiki 1.5.0 is the new stable release branch of MediaWiki, and is
recommended for all new installations.
Any wikis running a 1.5 beta or release candidate are strongly recommended
to upgrade to the final release, which includes a number of bug fixes and
a security fix for CSS bugs in Microsoft Internet Explorer.
IMPORTANT: Running a 1.3 or 1.4 wiki and don't want to jump to 1.5 yet?
Be sure to upgrade to 1.3.17 or 1.4.11, also released today. Versions
prior to 1.3.16 and 1.4.10 have a serious data corruption bug which is
triggered by a spambot known to operate in the wild.
=== What's new in 1.5? ===
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.
If .svg files are added to the upload whitelist, you can choose to render
them to rasterized .png images for inline display using one of several
external helper programs. See DefaultSettings.php for SVG options.
User accounts:
There are some changes to the user permissions system, with assignable
groups. Note that this does *not* allow you to make pages which are only
accessible to certain groups.
For details see: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:User_rights
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.
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.
You can check if your current wiki is in Latin-1 mode by using your browser's
"view source"; look for a line like this:
If it says charset=utf-8, you're ready. If it says charset=iso8859-1,
you may need to convert your data. (English-language wikis avoiding
any accented characters may be able to get away without conversion.)
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 may still run on 3.x, but wikis of non-trivial 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.
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.
=== Caveats ===
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 standard upgrade process does not yet fully automate
this, but you can try the alternate partial-upgrader in upgrade1_5.php.
The upgrade from 1.4 to 1.5 schema has not been tested for all cases, so
it's possible you may experience problems in some combinations.
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, available
as maintenance/dumpBackup.php.
For more information on how we run our own public data dumps at Wikimedia,
see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dumps
PostgreSQL:
The table definitions for PostgreSQL install are out of date. PostgreSQL
support may return in later releases, pending appropriate patches.
MySQL 4.1+:
Some users may encounter installation problems with MySQL 4.1 or higher
due to strange charset encoding / collation configurations. Try setting
to 'latin1' or 'utf8' if you encounter problems.
== MediaWiki 1.5 release candidate 4 ==
August 29, 2005
MediaWiki 1.5rc4 is a preview release of the new 1.5 release series.
It fixes compatibility with PHP 5.1, and corrects two cross-site scripting
security bugs:
*