* Simple rate limiter for edits and page moves; set $wgRateLimits

[mediawiki.git] / RELEASE-NOTES

= 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 alpha 1 ==

May 3, 2005

This is a testing preview release, being put out mainly to aid testers in
finding installation bugs and other major problems. It is strongly recommended
NOT to run a live production web site on this alpha release.

**  WARNING: USE OF THIS ALPHA RELEASE MAY INFEST YOUR HOUSE WITH  **
**  TERMITES, ROT YOUR TEETH,  GROW HAIR ON YOUR PALMS, AND PASTE  **
**  INNUENDO  INTO  YOUR  C.V.  RIGHT  BEFORE  A  JOB  INTERVIEW!  **
**  DON'T SAY WE DIDN'T WARN YOU, MAN. WE TOTALLY DID RIGHT HERE.  **


=== Big changes ===

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.

User accounts:
  There are some changes to the user permissions system, with assignable
  groups. This is still somewhat in flux; do not rely on the present system
  that you see in this alpha to still be there.

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. This may not be on by default in final release,
  depending on support.

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.

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 should
  still run, but wikis of significant 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 later this year.

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.


=== What's still waiting? ===

These things should be fixed by the time 1.5.0 final is released:

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 upgrade process does not yet fully automate this.
  
  In general the upgrade from 1.4 to 1.5 schema has not been tested for all
  cases, and there may be problems.

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... but
  this hasn't been finished yet.

PostgreSQL:
  The table definitions for PostgreSQL install are out of date, and patches
  to support PostgreSQL from the main installer are still pending.

MySQL 4.1+:
  Proper charset encoding / collation configuration for installs on MySQL 4.1
  and higher still needs to be fiddled with. Some bits may fail on the UTF-8
  setting due to some long field keys.

Authentication plugin fixes:
  The AuthPlugin interface needs some improvements to work better with LDAP,
  HTTP basic auth, and other such environments. Some patches are pending.


=== Smaller changes ===

Various bugfixes, small features, and a few experimental things:

* 'live preview' reduces preview reload burden on supported browsers
* support for external editors for files and wiki pages:
  http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:External_editors
* Schema reworking: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposed_Database_Schema_Changes/October_2004
* New WikiSyntax: -- turns into — or – depending on context
* (bug 15) Allow editors to view diff of their change before actually submitting an edit
* (bug 190) Hide your own edits on the watchlist
* (bug 510): Special:Randompage now works for other namespaces than NS_MAIN.
* (bug 1015) support for the full wikisyntax in <gallery> captions.
* (bug 1105) A "Destination filename" (save as) added to Special:Upload Upload.
* (bug 1352) Images on description pages now get thumbnailed regardless of whether the thumbnail is larger than the original.
* (bug 1662) A new magicword, {{CURRENTMONTHABBREV}} returns the abbreviation of the current month
* (bug 1668) 'Date format' supported for other languages than English, see:
  http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-March/028364.html
* (bug 1739) A new magicword, {{REVISIONID}} give you the article or diff database
  revision id, useful for proper citation.
* (bug 1998) Updated the Russian translation.
* (bug 2064) Configurable JavaScript mimetype with $wgJsMimeType
* (bug 2084) Fixed a regular expression in includes/Title.php that was accepting invalid syntax like #REDIRECT [[foo] in redirects
* It's now possible to invert the namespace selection at Special:Allpages and Special:Contributions
* No longer using sorbs.net to check for open proxies by default.
* What was $wgDisableUploads is now $wgEnableUploads, and should be set to true if one wishes to enable uploads.
* Supplying a reason for a block is no longer mandatory
* Language conversion support for category pages
* $wgStyleSheetDirectory is no longer an alias for $wgStyleDirectory;
* Special:Movepage can now take paramaters like Special:Movepage/Page_to_move
  (used to just be able to take paramaters via a GET request like index.php?title=Special:Movepage&target=Page_to_move)
* (bug 2151) The delete summary now includes editor name, if only one has edited the article.
* (bug 2105) Fixed from argument to the PHP mail() function. A missing space could prevent sending mail with some versions of sendmail.
* (bug 2228) Updated the Slovak translation
* ...and more!


=== Changes since 1.5alpha1 ===

* (bug 73) Category sort key is set to file name when adding category to
  file description from upload page (previously it would be set to
  "Special:Upload", causing problems with category paging)
* (bug 419) The contents of the navigation toolbar are now editable through
  the MediaWiki namespace on the  MediaWiki:navbar page.
* (bug 498) The Views heading in MonoBook.php is now localizable
* (bug 898) The wiki can now do advanced sanity check on uploaded files
  including virus checks using external programs.
* (bug 1692) Fix margin on unwatch tab
* (bug 1906) Generalize project namespace for Latin localization, update namespaces
* (bug 1975) The name for Limburgish (li) changed from "Lèmburgs" to "Limburgs
* (bug 2019) Wrapped the output of Special:Version in <div dir='ltr'> in order
  to preserve the correct flow of text on RTL wikis.
* (bug 2067) Fixed crash on empty quoted HTML attribute
* (bug 2075) Corrected namespace definitions in Tamil localization
* (bug 2079) Removed links to Special:Maintenance from movepagetext message
* (bug 2095) Triple-closing-bracket thing partly fixed
* (bug 2110) "noarticletext" should not display on Image page for "sharedupload" media
* (bug 2150) Fix tab indexes on edit form
* (bug 2152) Add missing bgcolor to attribute whitelist for <td> and <th>
* (bug 2176) Section edit 'show changes' button works correctly now
* (bug 2178) Use temp dir from environment in parser tests
* (bug 2217) Negative ISO years were incorrectly converted to BC notation
* Deprecated the {{msg:template}} syntax for referring to templates, {{msg: is
  now the wikisyntax representation of wfMsgForContent()
* Fix for reading incorrectly re-gzipped HistoryBlob entries
* HistoryBlobStub: the last-used HistoryBlob is kept open to speed up
  multiple-revision pulls
* Add $wgLegacySchemaConversion update-time option to reduce amount of
  copying during the schema upgrade: creates HistoryBlobCurStub reference
  records in text instead of copying all the cur_text fields. Requires
  that the cur table be left in place until/unless such fields are migrated
  into the main text store.
* Special:Export now includes page, revision, and user id numbers by
  default (previously this was disabled for no particular reason)
* dumpBackup.php can dump the full database to Export XML, with current
  revisions only or complete histories.
* The group table was renamed to groups because "group" is a reserved word in
  SQL which caused some inconveniances.
* New fileicons for c, cpp, deb, dvi, exe, h, html, iso, java, mid, mov, o,
  ogg, pdf, ps, rm, rpm, tar, tex, ttf and txt files based on the KDE
  crystalsvg theme.
* Fixed a bug in Special:Newimages that made it impossible to search for '0'
* Added language variant support for Icelandic, now supports "Íslenzka"
* The #p-nav id in MonoBook is now #p-navigation
* Putting $4 in msg:userstatstext will now give the percentage of
  admnistrators out of normal users.
* links and brokenlinks tables merged to pagelinks; this will reduce pain
  dealing with moves and deletes of widely-linked pages.
* Add validate table and val_ip column through the updater.
* Simple rate limiter for edits and page moves; set $wgRateLimits
  (somewhat experimental; currently needs memcached)

=== Caveats ===

Some output, particularly involving user-supplied inline HTML, may not
produce 100% valid or well-formed XHTML output. Testers are welcome to
set $wgMimeType = "application/xhtml+xml"; to test for remaining problem
cases, but this is not recommended on live sites. (This must be set for
MathML to display properly in Mozilla.)


For notes on 1.4.x and older releases, see HISTORY.


=== Online documentation ===

Documentation for both end-users and site administrators is currently being
built up on Meta-Wikipedia, and is covered under the GNU Free Documentation
License:

  http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents


=== Mailing list ===

A MediaWiki-l mailing list has been set up distinct from the Wikipedia
wikitech-l list:

  http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

A low-traffic announcements-only list is also available:
  http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-announce

It's highly recommended that you sign up for one of these lists if you're
going to run a public MediaWiki, so you can be notified of security fixes.


=== IRC help ===

There's usually someone online in #mediawiki on irc.freenode.net