Release notes/1.2 (original) (raw)

**This page contains release notes for an unsupported version of MediaWiki.**Users of this version are strongly recommended to upgrade to version 1.45.3 (latest stable), 1.44.5 (legacy version) or 1.43.8 (legacy long-term support version). This version no longer receives security updates and may contain critical vulnerabilities or major bugs, including the risk of data loss or corruption.

Not to be confused with MediaWiki 1.20

MediaWiki Stable Releases 1.2.x

Installation, compatibility, security fixlets:

This is the new production release; it is more or less in sync with what is running on Wikipedia right now. However this software is provided with NO WARRANTY of fitness for any purpose; there may be some interesting bugs, it may eat all your data, and documentation may not be up to date. New features in 1.2:

An index was added to recentchanges table to speed up Newpages (patch-rc-newindex.sql for manual updaters). Expiration date field has been added to ipblocks table (patch-ipb_expiry.sql for manual updaters). The links tables have slightly stricter indexes. ('links' and 'brokenlinks' are not changed on existing installations.)

The version 1.1.0 LocalSettings.sample file included the setting [$wgCategoryMagic](/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Manual:$wgCategoryMagic "Special:MyLanguage/Manual:$wgCategoryMagic (page does not exist)")[ ](/w/index.php?title=Manual:$wgCategoryMagic&action=edit&redlink=1 "Manual:$wgCategoryMagic (page does not exist)") = true; this setting is for an experimental feature that _does not work correctly_. If you have it left over, turn it off or you'll see mysterious problems with vanishing links. There may be problems with session handling on some systems. Checking the "remember my password" box may help as a temporary workaround. If you receive "Cannot load input file" errors when trying to get at the wiki after installation, make the following changes:

in LocalSettings.php change the line something like this: [$wgArticlePath](/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Manual:$wgArticlePath "Special:MyLanguage/Manual:$wgArticlePath")[ ](/wiki/Manual:$wgArticlePath "Manual:$wgArticlePath") = "/wiki/index.php/$1"; to: [$wgArticlePath](/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Manual:$wgArticlePath "Special:MyLanguage/Manual:$wgArticlePath")[ ](/wiki/Manual:$wgArticlePath "Manual:$wgArticlePath") = "/wiki/index.php?title=$1"; in index.php, remove these lines: if( isset( $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] ) ) { title=substr(title = substr( title=substr(_SERVER['PATH_INFO'], 1 ); } else { title=title = title=_REQUEST['title']; }

This is the new production release. Any following 1.1.x releases are expected to contain only bug fixes; developments of new features will go towards a 1.2.0 release. New features in 1.1:

Internal changes:

New translations:

"linkscc" table added. If upgrading manually (rather than with update.php), run maintenance/archives/patch-linkscc.sql to create the table. Older releases were dated snapshots from the old 'stable' branch:

Uploads are now disabled by default. If you've set up a secure configuration you can reenable uploads by putting: [$wgDisableUploads](/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Manual:$wgDisableUploads "Special:MyLanguage/Manual:$wgDisableUploads")[ ](/wiki/Manual:$wgDisableUploads "Manual:$wgDisableUploads") = false; into LocalSettings.php. Earlier versions of MediaWiki included a bug that potentially allows logged- in users to delete arbitrary files in directories writable by the web server user by manually feeding false form data; this is now fixed. As a reminder, disable PHP script execution in the upload directory! You may also wish to serve HTML pages as plaintext to prevent cookie- stealing JavaScript attacks. Example Apache config fragment:

<Directory "/Library/MediaWiki/web/upload"> # Ignore .htaccess files AllowOverride None

 # Serve HTML as plaintext
 AddType text/plain .html .htm .shtml
 
 # Don't run arbitrary PHP code.
 php_admin_flag engine off
 
 # If you've other scripting languages, disable them too.

If you're using update.php, the necessary database changes should be made automatically. To manually upgrade your database from the 2003-08-29 release, run the following SQL scripts from the maintenance subdirectory: archives/patch-ipblocks.sql archives/patch-interwiki.sql archives/patch-indexes.sql interwiki.sql To copy in the Wikipedia language-prefix interwikis as well, add: wikipedia-interwiki.sql

New interface localization files are included for:

Memcached is a distributed cache system. See http://www.danga.com/memcached/ MediaWiki can optionally use memcached to store some data between calls to reduce load on the database. Currently this is limited to user and talk page notification data, interwiki prefix/URL matches, and the UTF-8 conversion tables. MediaWiki includes version 1.0.10 of the (GPL'd) PHP memcached client by Ryan Gilfether; if memcached is disabled it acts as a dummy object with minimal overhead. To use memcached you'll need PHP installed with sockets support (this is notin the default configure options). See docs/memcached for some more details. Additionally, you can store login session data in memcached instead of the local filesystem, which can help to enable load-balancing by letting login sessions transparently work on multiple front-end web servers. (The primary other issue is with uploads, which requires some care in handling.) To enable this, set [$wgSessionsInMemcached](/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Manual:$wgSessionsInMemcached "Special:MyLanguage/Manual:$wgSessionsInMemcached")[ ](/wiki/Manual:$wgSessionsInMemcached "Manual:$wgSessionsInMemcached") = true; and set [$wgCookieDomain](/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Manual:$wgCookieDomain "Special:MyLanguage/Manual:$wgCookieDomain")[ ](/wiki/Manual:$wgCookieDomain "Manual:$wgCookieDomain") appropriately if exposing multiple hostnames. This system is new and may be volatile; login sessions will fail dramatically if memcached is unavailable when this option is turned on.

Online documentation

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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/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide

A MediaWiki-l mailing list has been set up distinct from the Wikipedia wikitech-l list: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

UseModWiki import script

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A stripped-down UseModWiki import script is available in the maintenance subdirectory. It is incomplete and requires a lot of manual clean-up, but does function for the brave and pure of heart.

The unmaintained Java-based test suite has been removed from the tarball release. If you really want it you can check it out from CVS.

First release under MediaWiki name.