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

You can browse each version of the MW code here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/source/mediawiki/branches/master/

1.24

• First release was in Nov. 2014.
• 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

• First release was in May 2015.
• 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

• First release was in Nov. 2015.
• 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

• First release was in Jun. 2016.
• 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.

• First release was in Nov. 2016.
• 1.28 has several database changes since 1.27, and will not work without schema updates.
• Numeric sorting in categories is now supported.