MediaWiki 1.25/en

MediaWiki 1.25 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 25 September 2014. The 1.25.0 stable release is expected to come out on Wednesday, May 27th 2015. Download the or checkout the   branch in Git to follow this release.

New features

 * Help:Page status indicators. You may want to adapt some templates and scripts on your wiki if you're e.g. adding icons on top right corner of the page.

Enhanced recent changes


MediaWiki now uses by default the extended watchlist and so called enhanced recent changes (preference ""), which also received several improvements in MediaWiki 1.24 and 1.25.

This means that Special:RecentChanges and Special:Watchlist show all the changes to each page in a given day, sorted by page rather than chronologically. Changes to each page are collapsed by default and a compact overview is shown, with links to collated diffs and counts of each user's actions. Full activity for an individual page can then be shown with a single click.

Users will no longer need to know in detail how a single change was chosen for display in order to figure out what else may have happened to the page that day, nor to scan a long list of non-contiguous lines on the screen in order to get a complete picture. The change is part of MediaWiki's evolution towards an interface which is more discoverable and less cluttered by default, while equally easy to quickly access in full, with the help of JavaScript. However, the (grouped) layout is an improvement for non-JavaScript users as well.

Live preview
While editing, you're not sure what a wikitext syntax will produce? That's no longer a problem, now that live preview is no longer experimental. By enabling the feature in your preferences, MediaWiki will display real-time what's the effect of your edits, so that you can quickly correct any mistake without needing to reload the page for a preview.

Performance
Frontend performance work continues.
 * Some 4 KB of HTML less on each MediaWiki page.

Import
Thanks to This, that and the other, import is now much easier from a wiki which has different namespaces than yours (e.g. because it's in another language).

Breaking changes

 * PHP 5.3.3 is now required to run MediaWiki.
 * The legacy skinning system, that uses skin autodiscovery, will be removed (deprecated since 1.23) and will be completely replaced with a new skinning system used like extensions on MediaWiki. This skinning system has been introduced with some minor changes since MediaWiki 1.12.
 * jQuery Migrate removed. Please see TODO on how to fix your local JavaScript.
 * The OpenSearchXml extension was merged into MediaWiki core. If you have it installed, you should undeploy it.

Configuration changes
More configuration defaults have been flipped, to reduce the strain needed by most administrators to get a sensibly-configured install. See the full release notes for details.

External libraries
This section is still a draft.

As part of the Library infrastructure for MediaWiki project, MediaWiki core now uses composer for managing external dependencies instead of copying the files into our code repo, such as CSSJanus and lessphp. In addition, non-MediaWiki specific code that was originally written for MediaWiki such as the cdb libraries have been split out into their own repos.

The tarball will contain these dependencies and the upgrade process for tarball users should be the same. Users who have cloned from git will need to follow the instructions at Download from Git. Installed libraries will be displayed upon Special:Version in their own section.

Some extensions may also require composer managed dependencies, such as Elastica, which depends upon the PHP elastica library. If you use the Extension distributor composer managed dependencies will automatically be included, otherwise you will need to install the manually. TODO: Explain how the composer merge plugin thing works.

Structured logging
TODO: Fill this in

Release schedule
The anticipated dates for point releases for 1.25 are as follows: