MediaWiki 1.18

To be released in the future!! Projected deployment date: by 31 August 2011. Release to follow very soon afterwards (perhaps within a month?). From a mid-July meeting:


 * can we get it deployed before Aug 31? RobLa thinks that is reasonable.  Release hopefully not very long after that.  What complicated 1.17 release: installer, postgres support, lack of postgres developers in the 1.17 dev cycle so we had a lot of lastminute postgres bugs.  For 1.18, no radical changes to installer.  So, if good enough to deploy to our site, theoretically not too much of a chore to make it good enough to install.  May be too optimistic.  Brion: in principle, should be able to push out 1.18 release much closer to 1.18 deployment.

See also the full release notes.

What's new?
We bring you new features, bug fixes and new exciting bugs for the next version release. This place will try to give you an overview of the most important features.



MediaWiki now supports women!
Women are most probably the most common gender in the human species, yet we used a neutral to link to their user page. In English this is not an issue since 'user' matches both genders. Since we support other languages, we now adapt the user links to reflect your gender. Be proud to be a male or female!

This feature requires the user to set their gender in their personal preferences.

Rotate pictures


We are now able to verify how the photographer took the photo. Was its camera upside down? We will rotate the picture preview accordingly, the source photo will remain unchanged though.

Improved directionality support


A lot of work has been done, and is still being done, to fix directionality bugs (Left-To-Right, Right-To-Left). Most notably bug 6100 is fixed, which allows to display an RTL interface on an LTR wiki properly (and vice versa). This was developed under $wgBetterDirectionality, which is now no longer used because the improvements are merged with the core code.

A positive consequence is that the page content on wikis with multiple scripts is aligned according to the direction of the selected variant. For example, on a Kazakh language wiki, selecting the Arabic script variant will align the text as RTL, while selecting the Latin or Cyrillic variant will align it as LTR.

New plugin for collapsible elements
The new jQuery.makeCollapsible allow you to create collapsible tables, lists and so on, by adding the class  to the elements. See the manual for details.

Protocol-relative URLs
MediaWiki now supports protocol- relative URLs in links, interwiki targets and $wgServer. Protocol-relative URLs look like  ; the browser will recognize this as   when following a link from an HTTP page, and   when following a link from an HTTPS page. This way, protocol-relative URLs enable a wiki to support HTTP and HTTPS while serving the same HTML for both, which means the parser cache doesn't have to be split.

Examples

 * Setting  to something like   instead of   is now supported.
 * By default, links to your wiki in Squid purges, IRC feeds and e-mail notifications will use HTTP. If you want them to use HTTPS, set $wgInternalServer (for Squid purges) and/or $wgCanonicalServer (for IRC feeds and e-mail notifications) to something like
 * Same for  in the interwiki table
 * Links like  now work
 * This is required because things like  would otherwise break if   is protocol-relative

Stuff!
MediaWiki 1.18 comes with MOAR stuff.