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 (en-ca).
 * 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.
 * Norwegian (bokmål) (nb) (renamed from no).
 * The Latin script for Uyghur was incorrectly marked as right-to-left language.
 * Make Brazilian Portuguese a fallback of Portuguese.
 * Fallback language of Assamese from is now English.
 * Update date format for Upper and Lower Sorbian: month names need the genitive.
 * Serbian variant conversion improvements.
 * Lower diacritics in titles for Indic languages (Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, Malyalam and Odiya) are no longer cut off.
 * Gendered namespaces added for Czech.
 * Larger numbers (e.g. Terabytes, Petabytes, Exabytes, Zetabytes and Yottabytes) are now supported.

Extensions developers

 * Extensions can now participate in the extraction of titles from URL paths.
 * Removed SkinTemplateSetupPageCss hook; use BeforePageDisplay instead.
 * 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.
 * Parser::clearTagHooks now clear function tag hooks when it clears other tag hooks.
 * Parser::getTags now returns function tag hooks so that they show up on Special:Version.
 * Added CSS classes for the action being performed.
 * Added 'APIGetDescription' hook so that extension authors can add information to the output of api.php.
 * 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

 * ResourceLoaderWikiModule now auto-updates when messages in the MediaWiki namespace are created or updated.
 * Add support for custom loadScript sources to ResourceLoader.
 * Third-party users and/or extensions can create new classes extending ResourceLoaderModule, re-implementing the getSource-method to return something else.
 * Embed "private" ResourceLoader modules in the before the first loader link, instead of in the after the last loader link
 * Popular ResourceLoader modules (e.g. mediawiki.util) are now preloaded 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.
 * This was needed because ResourceLoader was rewritten and some needed dependencies were not expressed. It should not be depended on.
 * Removed $wgResourceLoaderInlinePrivateModules, now always enabled.

Watchlist

 * Special:Watchlist no longer sets links to feed when the user is anonymous.
 * Accesskeys and tooltips added to submit buttons on Special:EditWatchlist.
 * Watchlist editing has been improved so that broken or invalid titles now.
 * wlexcludeuser parameter added to ApiFeedWatchlist.
 * Action=watch now parses messages using the correct title instead of "API".

Logging

 * Searching blocked usernames in block log should is clearer.
 * Log comments are now truncated correctly in multibyte character languages.