User:Iritscen/WikiFuture

Below are any notable changes that we should look forward to, or watch out for, if upgrading MediaWiki (besides various security fixes). Source: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Release_notes

Oldest version of MediaWiki still supported as of June 2017: 1.27. Source: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Version_lifecycle

Future 1.19 versions

No notable feature changes have come after our current installation version (1.19.2), but security fixes are available up to 1.19.24.

1.20

• 1.20 has several database changes since 1.19, and will not work without schema updates.
• Minimum PHP version is now 5.3.2, minimum SQL version is now MySQL 5.0.2, PostgreSQL 8.3, SQLite 3.3.7.
• Improved diff view (but we have already back-ported this into our Vector.css).
• New special page Special:MostInterwikis.
• Live preview functionality has been improved.
• "Show" options on Special:RecentChanges and Special:RecentChangesLinked are now remembered between successive clicks.
• Sanitizer::fixDeprecatedAttributes should convert "align" attribute to margin or float instead of text-align (for non-table-cells).
• Removed white border around thumbnails in galleries.
• Section edit and TOC hide/show links are excluded from selection and copy/paste on supporting browsers.
• Allow importing pages as subpage.
• Allow {{PAGESINCATEGORY}} to distinguish between 'all', 'pages', 'files' and 'subcats'.
• Option on Special:Prefixindex and Special:Allpages to not show redirects.
• The user right 'upload_by_url' is no longer given to sysops by default. This only affects installations which have $wgAllowCopyUploads set to true.

1.21

• 1.21 has several database changes since 1.20, and will not work without schema updates.
• Requirements remain the same as for 1.20.
• BREAKING CHANGE: Filenames of maintenance scripts were standardized into lowerCamelCase format, and made more explicit.
• The username field is not pre-filled when creating an account.
• removeUnusedAccounts.php maintenance script now ignores newuser log when determining whether an account is used (there's a removeUnusedAccounts script?!).
• In the sidebar of Vector, CologneBlue, Monobook, and Monobook-based skins, the heading levels have been changed from (variously per skin) <h4>, <h5> or <h6> to only <h3>s, with a <h2> hidden heading above them. If you are styling or scripting the headings in a custom way, this change will require updates to your site's CSS or JS.
• Update filename field on Upload page after having sanitized it.
• Diffs while editing an old revision should again diff against the current revision.
• SpecialDoubleRedirect should support interwiki redirects.
• fixDoubleRedirects.php should support interwiki redirects.
• SpecialBrokenRedirect should not list interwiki redirects.
• Hide rollback link if a user is the only contributor of the page.
• The HTML5 tag has been whitelisted (this is for highlighting text).
• $wgVectorUseSimpleSearch is now enabled by default.

1.22

• 1.22 has several database changes since 1.21, and will not work without schema updates.
• Requirements remain the same as for 1.20.
• Code specific to the Math extension was marked as deprecated.
• The collapsibleNav feature from the Vector extension has been moved to the Vector skin in core.
• Methods Title::userCanEditCssSubpage and Title::userCanEditJsSubpage, deprecated since 1.19, have been removed.
• MediaWiki will now flash a confirmation message upon successfully editing a page.
• A new Special:Redirect page was added, providing lookup by revision ID, user ID, or file name. The old Special:Filepath page was reimplemented to redirect through Special:Redirect.
• Event namespace used by jquery.makeCollapsible has been changed from 'mw-collapse' to 'mw-collapsible' for consistency with the module name.
• Converted the table of contents on wiki pages from <table> to <div> and adjusted skin CSS accordingly. The CSS was carefully crafted to be backwards-compatible in all reasonable cases (uses of the __TOC__ magic word, the #toc CSS id and the .toc CSS class). However, particularly bad abuse of the id or the class can possibly break.
• Broken files tracking category removed from pages if an image with that name is uploaded.
• portal-url and currentevents-url have been removed from the default Sidebar; helppage now points to a mediawiki.org page which is guaranteed to exist. Any sysop can customize the sidebar by editing MediaWiki:Sidebar.
• The 'edit' right no longer allows for editing a user's own CSS and JS.
• New rights 'editmyusercss', 'editmyuserjs', 'viewmywatchlist', 'editmywatchlist', 'viewmyprivateinfo', 'editmyprivateinfo', and 'editmyoptions' restrict actions that were formerly allowed by default. They have been added to the default for $wgGroupPermissions['*'].
• The 'editprotected' right no longer allows bypassing of all page protection restrictions. Any group using it for this purpose will now need to have all the individual rights listed in $wgRestrictionTypes for the same effect.
• Special:ListFiles can now show old versions of files. Additionally Special:AllMyUploads was introduced so the user can get a list of all things they have ever uploaded, even if it was subsequently overriden.
• Add a mode parameter to <gallery> tag with potential options of "traditional", "nolines", "packed", "packed-overlay", or "packed-hover".
• can now be used inside WikiText.
• Special:PrefixIndex now lets you strip the searched prefix from the displayed titles. Given a list of articles named Bug1, Bug2, you can now transclude the list of bug numbers using: {{Special:PrefixIndex/Bug|stripprefix=1}}. The special page form received a new checkbox matching that option.
• New user rights have been added to increase granularity in rights management for extensions such as OAuth:

• editmyusercss controls whether a user may edit their own CSS subpages.
• editmyuserjs controls whether a user may edit their own JS subpages.
• viewmywatchlist controls whether a user may view their watchlist.
• editmywatchlist controls whether a user may edit their watchlist.
• viewmyprivateinfo controls whether a user may access their private information (e.g. registered email address, real name).
• editmyprivateinfo controls whether a user may change their private information.
• editmyoptions controls whether a user may change their preferences.

• The lists of templates used on the page and hidden categories it is a member of, shown below the edit form, are now collapsible (and collapsed by default).
• {{ROOTPAGENAME}} introduced, contains the name of the topmost page without namespace.
• New versions of login (Special:UserLogin) and create account (Special:UserLogin/signup) forms using the "vform" compact vertical form layout. These forms use new messages that assume a "Help logging in" link, see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Page_customizations; https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Account_creation_user_experience/Strings lists the message key changes.
• EditWarning: A warning is shown when an editor leaves the edit form without saving (enabled by default, users can opt-out via the 'useeditwarning' preference). This feature was moved from the Vector extension, and is now part of core for all skins. Take care when upgrading that you don't use an older version of the Vector extension as this feature may conflict.
• wikibits: Drop support for mwCustomEditButtons. It defaults to an empty array and emits mw.log.warn when accessed.
• Legacy skins Simple, MySkin, Chick, Standard and Nostalgia were all removed.

1.23

• 1.23 has several database changes since 1.22, and will not work without schema updates.
• Requirements remain the same as for 1.20.
• Preferences 'watchcreations', 'watchdefault', 'enotifwatchlistpages' ("Add pages I create and files I upload to my watchlist", "Add pages and files I edit to my watchlist", "Email me when a page or file on my watchlist is changed") are now enabled by default. In addition new user accounts' personal and talk pages are now watched by them by default.
• Add expensive parser functions {{REVISIONID:}}, {{REVISIONUSER:}} and {{REVISIONTIMESTAMP:}} (with friends).
• The MediaWiki:Group-user.{css,js} pages can now be used to add custom CSS or JavaScript enabled only for registered users.
• [[Special:Diff]] was added, allowing users to create internal links to revision comparison pages using syntax such as [[Special:Diff/12345]], [[Special:Diff/12345/prev]] or [[Special:Diff/12345/98765]].
• Slight changes to the typography. The details are listed here, but the gist of it is a classier serif font for headers, slightly larger text, and that text is now dark-dark-gray instead of black.
• Redirect pages, when viewed with redirect=no, no longer hide the remaining page content.
• The global functions addButton and insertTags (for mw.toolbar.addButton and mw.toolbar.insertTags) now emits mw.log.warn when accessed.
• Display MediaWiki:Loginprompt on the login page (as in 1.21).

1.24

• 1.24 has several database changes since 1.23, and will not work without schema updates.
• Requirements remain the same as for 1.20 except that MediaWiki now requires PHP's iconv extension.
• MediaWiki will no longer run if register_globals or magic quotes are enabled.
• The server's canonical hostname is available as $wgServerName.
• Users in the 'sysop' group have access to Special:MergeHistory by default.
• {{!}} is now a magic word that produces the | character. This removes the need for our Pipe template for purposes such as passing pipes inside of parameters.
• Redirects to sections will now update the URL in browser's address bar using the HTML5 History API. When [[Dog]] redirects to [[Animals#Dog]], the user will now see "Animals#Dog" in their browser instead of "Dog#Dog".
• Improved Vector skin performance by removing collapsibleNav, which used to collapse some sidebar elements by default. This removes -list id suffixes like p-lang-list: instead of using things like #p-lang-list, you can do #p-lang .body ul.
• BREAKING CHANGE: All four built-in MediaWiki skins (Vector, Monobook, Modern and Cologne Blue) were moved out of MediaWiki core to their own respective repositories. They will be installed with the release tarball, but you must install them separately if installing MediaWiki from source code.

1.25

• 1.25 has several database changes since 1.24, and will not work without schema updates.
• MediaWiki now requires PHP 5.3.3, but other requirements have not changed since 1.24.
• Clickable anchors for each section heading in the content are now generated and appear in the gutter on hovering over the heading (huh?).
• Special:WantedPages no longer lists broken redirects (since that has always had its own special page).
• A new message (defaulting to blank), 'editnotice-notext', can be shown to users when they are editing if no edit notices apply to the page being edited.
• You can now make the sitenotice appear to logged-in users only by editing MediaWiki:Anonnotice and replacing its content with "". Setting it to "-" (default) will continue disable it and fallback to MediaWiki:Sitenotice.
• MediaWiki now requires certain external libraries to be installed. In the past these were bundled inside the Git repository of MediaWiki core, but now they need to be installed separately. For users using the tarball, this will be taken care of and no action will be required. Users using Git will either need to use composer to fetch dependencies or use the mediawiki/vendor repository which includes all dependencies for MediaWiki core and ones used in Wikimedia deployment.
• The Special:WhatLinksHere page linked from 'Number of redirects to this page' on action=info about a file page does not list file links anymore (whuh?).
• Search bar is not autofocused unless it is empty so that proper scrolling using arrow keys is possible.
• The global importScriptURI and importStylesheetURI functions, as well as the loadedScripts object, from wikibits.js (deprecated since 1.17) now emit warnings through mw.log.warn when accessed.

1.26

• 1.26 has several database changes since 1.25, and will not work without schema updates.
• Requirements remain the same as for 1.25.
• The "Signature" button on the edit toolbar is now hidden by default in non-talk namespaces. A new configuration variable, $wgExtraSignatureNamespaces, controls in which subject (non-talk) namespaces the "Signature" button on the edit toolbar will be displayed.

1.27

• 1.27 has several database changes since 1.26, and will not work without schema updates.
• MediaWiki now requires PHP 5.5.9 and MySQL 5.0.3 instead of 5.0.2.
• Many changes to the authentication process have been made, which may affect our third-party extension ConfirmAccount.

1.28

These changes are listed through 1.28.2.

• 1.28 has several database changes since 1.27, and will not work without schema updates.
• Numeric sorting in categories is now supported.