MediaWiki 1.26

MediaWiki 1.26 is currently being developed.

Consult the  file for the full list of changes.

It is currently deployed on Wikimedia Foundation wikis through incremental "1.26/wmfNN" branches starting April 08, 2015 (1>Special:PrefixIndex//wmf |see details of each).

The 1.26.0 stable release is expected to come out sometime in November 2015.

Download the or checkout the   branch download>Special:MyLanguage/Download from Git|in Git to follow this release.

Performance

 * ResourceLoader now loads all scripts asynchronously. The top-queue and startup modules are no longer synchronously loaded.
 * Caches that need purging ability now use the  interface. This corresponds to a new   setting, which defaults to using the   settings.
 * Callers needing fast light-weight data stores use  to select the store type from  . The default is the local database.
 * Interface message overrides in the MediaWiki namespace will now be cached in memcached and APC (if available), rather than memcached and local files.
 * was added, which controls the request time limit for potentially slow POST requests that need to be as atomic as possible.

New hooks

 * A new hook, ' ', was added to log exceptions in non-standard ways.
 * Revive the ' ' hook which occurs after the list of search results are rendered. The initial use case is to append a "give us feedback" link beneath the search results.
 * Added a new hook, ' ', which allows extensions to reject an otherwise-successful parser cache lookup. The intent is to allow extensions to manage the eviction of archaïc HTML output from the cache.
 * Added new hooks 'EnhancedChangesListModifyLineData' & 'EnhancedChangesListModifyBlockLineData', to modify the data used to build lines in enhanced recentchanges and watchlist.
 * Added a new hook, ' ', to allow modification of the query used by Special:Random to select random pages.

Information on 'actual' watchers of a page
It's now possible to use the info action (accessible from the sidebar) to get a count of "actual watchers" of a page, in addition to the already-available count of all the users having it in their watchlist ([ example]).

This information will make collaboration easier on your wiki, for instance by giving feedback to editors on how much their recent edits to a page were noticed by active users, or by setting reasonable expectations on how much a message on a certain talk page may be seen.

Other

 * Change tags can now be hidden in the interface by disabling the associated " " interface message.
 * The ':' (colon) character is now invalid in usernames for new accounts. Existing accounts are not affected.
 * The expiration of the UserID and Token login cookies can be configured independently of the expiration of all other cookies.
 * Support for generating JPEG/PNG thumbnails from WebP images added if ImageMagick is used as image scaler . Uploading of WebP images still disabled by default. Add  to LocalSettings.php to enable uploading of WebP images.

Breaking changes

 * Deprecated API formats  and   have been completely removed.
 * was deprecated and removed. This was an experimental feature that was never enabled by default.
 * was deprecated and removed. This experimental feature was never enabled by default and is obsolete as of MediaWiki 1.26, in where ResourceLoader became fully asynchronous.
 * was removed (deprecated in 1.24).
 * Fields in  are now private. Use the accessors instead.

Deprecations

 * was deprecated. Set  to   instead if you want to disable the parser cache.
 * New-style continuation is now the default for API . Clients may use the ' ' parameter to receive raw query-continue data, but the new style is encouraged as it's harder to implement incorrectly.

Configuration changes

 * Users installing the Vector skin through composer will need to add  to their LocalSettings.php, it will no longer happen automatically.
 * is now  by default.
 * The "Signature" button on the edit toolbar is now hidden by default in non-talk namespaces. A new configuration variable,, controls in which subject (non-talk) namespaces the "Signature" button on the edit toolbar will be displayed.

API changes
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Schema changes
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Release schedule
The anticipated dates for point releases for 1.26 are as follows: