Release notes/1.1

MediaWiki 1.1 was the original version of MediaWiki that was released for public non-Wikimedia foundation use. This version is and therefore should not be installed on any new sites. Wikis that are running version 1.1 should upgrade as soon as possible.

Many of the configuration variables that are now associated with MediaWiki installations were developed during the release of MediaWiki 1.1. Note that the Wikimedia Foundation (specifically Wikipedia) were using a MediaWiki version often classified as "pre-1.1" that was not available to the public prior to the release of 1.1. The WMF pre-1.1 version is where the essential variables such as $wgSiteName and $wgVersion were developed.

New features in 1.1:

 * New wiki table syntax: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide:_Using_tables
 * User-editable interface messages: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_namespace
 * XML-wrapped page source export with optional history: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_import_and_export (There is not yet an import function!)
 * "Magic words" Fixes and tweaks:
 * linkscc table caches link data for rendering; faster
 * Numerous bugs in Cologne Blue skin fixed
 * Login gives warning about missing cookies
 * Block log, protection log added; deletion log now includes undeletions
 * Deletion & upload logs now escape comment text properly
 * Problems with  segments in section titles etc mitigated
 * Contributions offset and minor edit bugs fixed
 * Whatlinkshere now sorted alphabetically
 * Various exciting new profiling options.
 * Debug log is off by default.
 * Various small bugs fixed. Internal changes:
 * wfQuery has had a second parameter inserted, DB_READ or DB_WRITE. This value is not actually used so far.
 * Partial code for categories and Smarty template-based skins is in the tree but disabled.
 * Parts of Article.php have been moved to and . New translations:
 * fi - Finnish
 * ia - Interlingua
 * no - Norwegian
 * sk - Slovak
 * ta - Tamil

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

MediaWiki-20031118

 * Image deletion fixed.
 * Deletion of image old revisions now restricted to sysops (this is an irreversible action and not well logged)
 * Fixed maintenance scripts broken by last release's security fix
 * Many errors in script fixed.

MediaWiki-20031117

 * SECURITY FIX: stricter checking of include path
 * Fixed user contributions next/prev bug
 * Login cookies now have the database name prefixed to allow wikis to coexist in the same domain. This will invalidate any old saved password cookies.
 * Update cache timestamp when talk pages are created
 * Saving the login form in Mozilla no longer blanks password in prefs.
 * Check existence of source page before performing a move.
 * Detect invalid titles in Special:Allpages
 * Q-encode headers on outgoing inter-user e-mail
 * Updates to some translations.
 * Added table of contents border/bg to Cologne Blue, Nostalgia skins
 * Protected pages no longer appear unprotected when visited via redirect
 * Swapped old Wikipedia logo for the MediaWiki sunflower logo
 * install.php, update.php print warning on old PHP versions, added compatibility functions that might or might not help No database changes since 20031107; upgrading should be clean.

MediaWiki-20031107

 * Fixed various bugs!
 * Some speed improvements from tweaks to the table indexes
 * Limited support for memcached (see below)
 * New translations (see below)
 * Interwiki link data now kept in database for flexibility
 * Friendlier read-only source view if asked to edit a page when the db is locked or the page is protected.
 * Normal IP blocks auto-expire after 24 hours
 * Optional support for blocking usernames
 * Uploads disabled by default (see below)

Security note
Uploads are now disabled by default. If you've set up a secure configuration you can reenable uploads by putting: $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:  # 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. 

Database updates
If you're using, 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

Translations
New interface localization files are included for:
 * fy - Frisian
 * ro - Romanian
 * sl - Slovene
 * sq - Albanian
 * sr - Serbian

Memcached
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 not in 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 = true; and set $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
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

Mailing list
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
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.

Test suite removed
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.