User:Iritscen/WikiFuture

Below are any notable changes that we should look forward to, or watch out for, if upgrading MediaWiki (as well as significant security fixes). (Source)

Oldest maintained LTS version of MediaWiki: 1.39 (supported through November 2025).
Latest LTS version of MediaWiki: 1.39 (supported through November 2025). (Source)

Current version on OniGalore: 1.39.6

You can browse each version of the MW code HERE.

1.39

I have checked the release notes through 1.39.6.

• We are currently on the latest version of 1.39.

1.40

I have checked the release notes through 1.40.2.

• Requires PHP 7.4.3+ and the PHP extensions ctype, dom, fileinfo, iconv, intl, json, mbstring, xml.
• Special:Search can now show thumbnails for results for titles outside NS_FILE. This is controlled via the new onSearchResultProvideThumbnail hook.
• A new preference ('search-thumbnail-extra-namespaces') to allow users to control whether to show more thumbnails (per $wgThumbnailNamespaces)
• The preferences page now provides a search bar to find preferences, regardless of the tab on which they appear.
• $wgPasswordPolicies – This setting, which controls what makes for a valid password for wiki accounts, has been adjusted to raise the minimal password length from 1 to 8 characters. The initial limit of 1 has been in place since MediaWiki 1.26. If you wish to allow shorter passwords, you can over-ride it in your LocalSettings following the guidance on MediaWiki.org.
• You should configure your webserver to return the http header 'X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff' for the /images directory. This will instruct browsers to not apply content sniffing when accessing the files. MediaWiki before 1.40 shipped with a content sniffer which disallowed potentially dangerous files at upload time, but this protection has now been removed in favor of this 'X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff' header and the installer will return a warning when it is not in place.
• Maintenance scripts should now be executed using maintenance/run.php, e.g. maintenance/run.php update not maintenance/update.php as before.
• Five extensions have now been bundled with MediaWiki:
  • The DiscussionTools extension, which provides a forum-like editing experience for wikitext-based discussion pages. This is the dreaded new "forum-like" experience for talk pages that I don't think any of us will want. It seems like it will be on by default so we'll have to change $wgDiscussionToolsEnable to false. Hopefully it doesn't do anything to mess with talk pages immediately upon install.
  • The Echo extension, which provides a system of user notifications.
  • The Linter extension, which warns about use of deprecated wikitext.
  • The LoginNotify extension, which warns users about failed attempted logins.
  • The Thanks extension, which lets users thank editors for edits.
• The Renameuser extension has been moved to MediaWiki core. It is now possible to rename users without installing an extension. The extension had already been bundled with MediaWiki since 1.18.

1.41

• Requires PHP 7.4.3+ and the PHP extensions ctype, dom, fileinfo, iconv, intl, json, mbstring, xml.
• MediaWiki now requires browsers to support ES6 for them to receive JavaScript, up from ES5. In practice, this primarily means that users of Internet Explorer 11 (EOL in 2022) will no longer get JavaScript tools.
• Some interesting new configuration variables:
  • $wgImplicitRights - A list of implicit rights, in addition to the ones defined by the core. Rights in this list are granted implicitly to all users, but rate limits may apply to them.
  • $wgInterwikiLogoOverride - List of interwiki logos overrides.
  • $wgSVGNativeRendering - Whether native SVG rendering by the browser agent is allowed
  • $wgSVGNativeRenderingSizeLimit - If $wgSVGNativeRendering is set to 'partial', this sets the size limit for an SVG file to be rendered as a PNG instead of directly by the browser.