MediaWiki 1.24

MediaWiki 1.24 is currently being developed. Consult the file for the full list of changes. It is currently deployed on Wikimedia Foundation wikis through incremental "wmf"-branches starting April 2014. The 1.24.0 stable release is expected to come out somewhere in 2014. Download the or checkout the   branch in Git to follow this release.

Preferences made easier
MediaWiki is known to be extremely flexible and customisable, but few users use its full potential. In 1.24, we aim to make dozens obscure preferences easily discoverable and obvious to use.


 * 52817

New features

 * Category pages can now be moved.
 * MergeHistory for all administrators by default.
 * Improvements have been made to the password storage system in 77645, allowing improved security against offline attacks should a wiki's database be compromised by attackers. Then, in 149658, the default password storage algorithm was changed to PBKDF2.
 * PBKDF2 and Bcrypt have built-in support in PHP. The new extensible password API makes it trivial to implement scrypt support if we wanted to.

Usability

 * The move feature and other actions are now discoverable in Vector, thanks to a label for the dropdown where they're hidden by default.
 * 9360
 * 15484

Performance
In 2014, MediaWiki development has a new focus on frontend performance.


 * Improved Vector skin performance by removing collapsibleNav, which used to collapse some sidebar elements by default. This removes -list id suffixes like p-lang-list: instead of using things like #p-lang-list, you can do #p-lang .body ul.

Breaking changes

 * Upgrade jQuery to version 1.11.x: wikitech-l/2014-June/076842.html
 * Support for register_globals (deprecated 5 years ago) was dropped, MediaWiki will no longer run with it enabled. See email notification for more details.

Internet Explorer 6 deprecated
Full support for Internet Explorer 6 has been removed: it will browse MediaWiki without JavaScript. JavaScript fixes specific to it have also been removed. Additional IE6 fixes that exist in MediaWiki:Common.js and similar can be safely removed.

See Compatibility for more information.

Skins no longer loaded after upgrade?
MediaWiki 1.24 no longer uses the skin autodiscovery mechanism to load default skins, instead requiring that the skins be manually loaded in, much like extensions (see Manual:Skin configuration). This will require you to update  after the upgrade – a prominently displayed warning message should guide you through the process, suggesting the exact configuration that you need to add.

If you're upgrading via a tarball release, that is all you need to do. If you're upgrading via git or otherwise from source, note that the skins themselves have been each moved to a separate repository and will need to be installed separately (much like extensions, some basic ones are included in the tarball).

Release schedule

 * TBD