MediaWiki 1.36

MediaWiki 1.36 is the current legacy release of MediaWiki. Consult the file for the full list of changes. It was deployed on Wikimedia Foundation wikis through incremental " wmf "-branches between 21 July 2020 and 15 April 2021. The 1.36.0 stable release came out in May 27, 2021. Download or checkout the  branch in Git to follow this release.

New features

 * The logo of MediaWiki has changed. This means that the "Powered By MediaWiki" button shown in the skin footer will be different.
 * All HTML5 named entities are now accepted in wikitext.
 * (106263) The file description page's alternate sizes now include 2048px.

Action API changes

 * `Access-Control-Max-Age` was added to the default list of headers allowed for cross-origin API requests.
 * Accounts with the 'bot' right no longer have pages automatically added to the watchlist when making API edits, regardless of their preferences. This is to reduce the size of the watchlist data in the database. To add API bot edits to the watchlist, explicitly set the 'watch' option.

Upgrade notes

 * MediaWiki 1.36 now requires the PHP internationalization extension (commonly referred to as Intl, ext-intl, or php-intl).
 * The MediaWiki:Autoblock_whitelist block exemption control has been moved to MediaWiki:Block-autoblock-exemptionlist. If you use this feature, please move the MediaWiki:Autoblock_whitelist page.
 * (275334) is sometimes used to change configuration settings. This is not safe; extension functions are run relatively late, some services are already initialized by that point and so they use the old  configuration. Changes in 1.36 make this kind of breakage even more common. You can use the MediaWikiServices hook instead. (In the future there might be a dedicated hook for configuration changes.)
 * The MediaWiki update script, maintenance/update.php, used to accept `--nopurge` as an option to prevent clearing caches stored in the database during upgrade. This is no longer encouraged, and the option has been removed.

New configuration options

 * (256001) – This setting controls a new feature that marks edits as reverts if they restore the page to an exact previous state. This configuration variable sets the maximum number of revisions of a page that will be checked against every new edit. Set this to 0 to disable the feature entirely.
 * (244058) — This setting was added to control caching of ParserOutput for old (non-current) revisions.
 * (265263) - This setting configures the "remember me" checkbox on account log-in systems via RememberMeAuthenticationRequest.
 * (157145) – This setting lets sysadmins configure skins that support meta tags. These tags make sharing of MediaWiki pages on a variety of social platforms more contentful and thus useful.
 * (280944) - This setting lets sysadmins disable the jQuery Migrate plugin. It has been enabled by default since MediaWiki 1.27. In future releases it will be disabled by default.

Changed configuration options

 * – This setting selects the logo shown on the site. The default value for the site logo, which is shown in an install if you have not set one, will now be the new logo of MediaWiki.
 * (274695) — This setting, to disable the edit stashing feature when users start writing an edit summary, has been deprecated. In future releases, this feature will always be enabled.
 * – This setting, to enable remote on-demand media scaling, was deprecated. Use the `thumbProxyUrl` setting in instead.
 * and – These settings have been renamed, to  &  respectively. The former configuration variable names are deprecated, but will be used as the fall back if they are still set, and remain temporarily available for extensions which try to read them.
 * - The "coalesceKeys" option was removed without deprecation and replaced by a new "coalesceScheme" option, set to "hash_stop" by default. If you use Dynomite, then set the new "coalesceKeys" option to "hash_tag". The "cluster" and "mcrouterAware" options were also removed without deprecation. Use "broadcastRoutingPrefix" instead.

Removed configuration options

 * — This setting, deprecated in 1.35, has been removed.
 * — This setting, deprecated in 1.35, has been removed. Use group permission settings instead. For example, to prevent sysops from moving files, set ['sysop']['movefile'] = false;`
 * ,, , , , — These settings were removed. They became obsolete after 1.17 overhauled the database updater, but were kept for backward compatibility. The LoadExtensionSchemaUpdates hook should be used instead.
 * - This setting, deprecated in 1.35, has been removed. The last use of this setting was for pre-processor configuration, which was deprecated in 1.34 and removed in 1.35.
 * - This setting, ignored since 1.35, has been removed.
 * – This temporary setting has been removed, along with the schema change upgrade path it controlled. If your site is still using it, meaning you have not yet applied the `pp_sortkey` schema change from 1.24, you must now apply it before upgrading.
 * The deprecated password policies PasswordCannotMatchBlacklist and PasswordNotInLargeBlacklist were removed. Please use PasswordCannotMatchDefaults and PasswordNotInCommonList respectively instead.