MediaWiki 1.19

MediaWiki 1.19 is a release that contains many new features and bug fixes. This is a summary of the major changes of interest to users. You can consult the RELEASE-NOTES file for the full list of changes in this version. It was deployed to Wikimedia wikis in February 2012 and will have a release candidate and hopefully the final release out in April 2012.

What's new?
There are hundreds of bug fixes, new features, and changed features. The comprehensive list of what's new is in the release notes. Here's an overview:

Easier reading, editing, and maintenance

 * Disable the partial HTML and MathML rendering options for Math, and render as PNG by default (see RFC and )
 * MathML mode was so incomplete most people thought it simply didn't work.
 * Searching blocked usernames in block log is now clearer.
 * The default user signature now contains a talk link in addition to the user link.
 * Better timezone recognition in user preferences.

Internationalization

 * More gender support (for instance in user lists).
 * Added language: Canadian English.
 * Language converter improved, e.g. it now works depending on the page content language.
 * Time and number-formatting magic words also now depend on the page content language.
 * Bidirectional support further improved after 1.18.
 * Canadian English (en-ca) (new).
 * Norwegian (bokmål) (nb) (renamed from no).
 * Uighur (Latin) (ug-latn) was incorrectly marked as right-to-left language.
 * (bug 30217) Make pt-br a fallback of pt.
 * (bug 31193) Set fallback language of Assamese from Bengali to English.
 * Update date format for dsb and hsb: month names need the genitive.
 * (bug 28643) Serbian variant conversion improvements (Nikola Smolenski).
 * (bug 29405, bug 30809) Lower diacritics are invisible in titles in Indic languages Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, Malyalam and Odiya.
 * (bug 32826) Titles in indic languages are partially cut.
 * (bug 33367) Gendered namespaces for Czech.
 * (bug 33014) Language::formatSize/formatBitrate should be able to deal with larger numbers (tera-yotta).

Extensions developers

 * Extensions can now participate in the extraction of titles from URL paths.
 * Removed SkinTemplateSetupPageCss hook; use BeforePageDisplay instead.
 * (bug 22555) Remove or skip strip markers from tag hooks like &lt;nowiki&gt; in core parser functions which operate on strings, such as padleft.
 * Added two new GetLocalURL hooks to better serve extensions working on a limited type of titles.
 * Hook added to check for exempt from account creation throttle. (name?)
 * Added hook BitmapHandlerCheckImageArea.
 * getUserPermissionsErrors and getUserPermissionsErrorsExpensive hooks are now also called when checking for 'read' permission.
 * New path mappings can be added using the WebRequestPathInfoRouter hook and adding paths to the PathRouter.
 * Extensions can use the 'Language::getMessagesFileName' hook to define new languages using messages files outside of core.
 * Extensions can use the RequestContextCreateSkin hook to override what skin is loaded in some contexts.
 * (bug 33525) clearTagHooks doesn't clear function hooks.
 * (bug 33523) Function tag hooks don't appear on Special:Version.
 * (bug 4438) Add CSS hook for current WikiPage action.
 * Added 'APIGetDescription' hook.
 * The $variant argument in the hooks for the Title::get{Local,Full,Link,Canonical}URL methods have been removed, the variant is now part of the $query argument.
 * Support for the deprecated hook MagicWordMagicWords was removed.

Heads-up for MediaWiki administrators

 * Bumped MySQL version requirement to 5.0.2.
 * The command-line installer supports various RDBMSes better.
 * New skins/common/*.css files usable by skins instead of having to copy piles of generic styles from MonoBook or Vector's css.
 * BREAKING CHANGE: CSS styling for the  wikitable class is now more specific to prevent it from affecting nested tables, which caused various issues (bug 30485 and bug 33434). If your wiki has overridden CSS rules for ".wikitable", please revise them and adjust where necessary. For comparison, use the "table.wikitable" section in skins/common/shared.css as base.
 * BREAKING CHANGE: Legacy global array 'ta' and global function 'akeytt' have been removed from wikibits.js.
 * jquery.mwPrototypes module was renamed to jquery.mwExtension.
 * The maintenance script populateSha1.php was renamed to the more descriptive populateImageSha1.php.

And more!

 * The interwiki links table can now be accessed also when the interwiki cache is used (used in the API and the Interwiki extension).

ResourceLoader

 * (bug 35036) ResourceLoaderWikiModule should auto-update when messages (created or overwritten) in the MediaWiki namespace change.
 * (bug 30022) Add support for custom loadScript sources to ResourceLoader.
 * (bug 26486) ResourceLoader modules with paths to nonexistent files cause PHP warnings/notices to be thrown.
 * (bug 30914) Embeddable ResourceLoader modules (user.options, user.tokens) should be loaded in for proper dependency resolution.
 * (bug 33746) Preload popular ResourceLoader modules (mediawiki.util) as stop-gap for scripts missing dependencies.
 * New configuration variable $wgPreloadJavaScriptMwUtil has been introduced for this (set to false by default for new installations). Set to true if your wiki has a large amount of user/site scripts that are lacking dependency information. In the short to medium term these user/site scripts should be fixed by adding the used modules to the dependencies in the module registry and/or wrapping them in a callback to mw.loader.using.
 * Removed $wgResourceLoaderInlinePrivateModules, now always enabled.

Watchlist

 * Special:Watchlist no longer sets links to feed when the user is anonymous
 * (bug 33565) Add accesskey/tooltip to submit buttons on Special:EditWatchlist.
 * (bug 30232) add current time to message wlnote on Special:Watchlist.
 * (bug 28936, bug 5280) Broken or invalid titles can't be removed from watchlist.
 * (bug 34972) An error occurred while changing your watchlist settings for Special:WhatLinksHere/Example
 * wlexcludeuser parameter added to ApiFeedWatchlist.
 * (bug 34377) action=watch now parses messages using the correct title instead of "API".

Logging

 * (bug 1697) The way to search blocked usernames in block log should be clearer.
 * Warning about undefined index in certain situations when $wgLogRestrictions causes the first log type requested to be removed but not the others.
 * (bug 28649) Preventing half truncated multi-byte unicode characters when truncating log comments.
 * (bug 35565) Special:Log/patrol doesn't indicate whether patrolling was automatic