Release notes/1.23

= MediaWiki release notes =

Security reminder: MediaWiki does not require PHP's register_globals. If you have it on, turn it off if you can.

MediaWiki 1.23
THIS IS NOT A RELEASE YET MediaWiki 1.23 is an alpha-quality branch and is not recommended for use in production.

Configuration changes in 1.23

 * $wgDebugLogGroups values may be set to an associative array with a 'destination' key specifying the log destination. The array may also contain a 'sample' key with a positive integer value N indicating that the log group should be sampled by dispatching one in every N messages on average. The sampling is random.
 * In addition to the current exception log format, MediaWiki now serializes exception metadata to JSON and logs it to the 'exception-json' log group. This makes MediaWiki easier to integrate with log aggregation and analysis tools.
 * $wgSquidServersNoPurge now supports the use of Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) notation to specify contiguous blocks of IPv4 and/or IPv6 addresses that should be trusted to provide X-Forwarded-For headers.

New features in 1.23

 * ResourceLoader can utilize the Web Storage API to cache modules client-side. Compared to the browser cache, caching in Web Storage allows ResourceLoader to be more granular about evicting stale modules from the cache while retaining the ability to retrieve multiple modules in a single HTTP request. This capability can be enabled by setting $wgResourceLoaderStorageEnabled to true. This feature is currently considered experimental and should only be enabled with care.
 * (bug 6092) Add expensive parser functions,  and  (with friends).
 * Add "wgRelevantUserName" to mw.config containing the current Skin::getRelevantUser value.
 * (bug 56033) Add content model to the page information.

Bug fixes in 1.23

 * (bug 41759) The "updated since last visit" markers (on history pages, recent changes and watchlist) and the talk page message indicator are now correctly updated when the user is viewing old revisions of pages, instead of always acting as if the latest revision was being viewed.
 * (bug 56443) Special:ConfirmEmail no longer shows a "Mail a confirmation code" when the email address is already confirmed. Also, consistently use "confirmed", rather than "authenticated", when messaging whether or not the user has confirmed an email address.

API changes in 1.23

 * (bug 54884) action=parse&prop=categories now indicates hidden and missing categories.

Languages updated in 1.23
MediaWiki supports over 350 languages. Many localisations are updated regularly. Below only new and removed languages are listed, as well as changes to languages because of Bugzilla reports.

Other changes in 1.23

 * The rc_type field in the recentchanges table has been superseded by a new rc_source field. The rc_source field is a string representation of the change type where rc_type was a numeric constant.  This field is not yet queried but will be in a future point release of 1.22.
 * Utilize update.php to create and populate this new field. On larger wiki's which do not wish to update recentchanges table in one large update please review the sql and comments in maintenance/archives/patch-rc_source.sql.
 * The rc_type field of recentchanges will be deprecated in a future point release.
 * The global variable $wgArticle has been removed after a lengthy deprecation
 * mediawiki.util: mw.util.wikiGetlink has been renamed to getUrl. (The old name still works, but is deprecated.)

Compatibility
MediaWiki 1.23 requires PHP 5.3.2 or later. MySQL is the recommended DBMS. PostgreSQL or SQLite can also be used, but support for them is somewhat less mature. There is experimental support for Oracle. The supported versions are:
 * MySQL 5.0.2 or later
 * PostgreSQL 8.3 or later
 * SQLite 3.3.7 or later
 * Oracle 9.0.1 or later

Upgrading
1.23 has several database changes since 1.22, and will not work without schema updates. Note that due to changes to some very large tables like the revision table, the schema update may take quite long (minutes on a medium sized site, many hours on a large site). If upgrading from before 1.11, and you are using a wiki as a commons repository, make sure that it is updated as well. Otherwise, errors may arise due to database schema changes. If upgrading from before 1.7, you may want to run refreshLinks.php to ensure new database fields are filled with data. If you are upgrading from MediaWiki 1.4.x or earlier, you should upgrade to 1.5 first. The upgrade script maintenance/upgrade1_5.php has been removed with MediaWiki 1.21. Don't forget to always back up your database before upgrading! See the file UPGRADE for more detailed upgrade instructions. For notes on 1.21.x and older releases, see HISTORY.

Online documentation
Documentation for both end-users and site administrators is available on MediaWiki.org, and is covered under the GNU Free Documentation License (except for pages that explicitly state that their contents are in the public domain): https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Documentation

Mailing list
A mailing list is available for MediaWiki user support and discussion:

https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

A low-traffic announcements-only list is also available:

https://lists.wikimedia.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.