MediaWiki 1.23

MediaWiki 1.23 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 October 2013. The 1.23.0 stable release is scheduled to come out in early June 2014. Download the or checkout the   branch in Git to follow this release. This will be a Long Term Support release (LTS) which will be supported until May 2017.

Skin autodiscovery deprecated
Skin autodiscovery, the legacy skin installation mechanism used by MediaWiki since very early versions (around 2004), has been officially deprecated and will be removed in MediaWiki 1.25.

MediaWiki 1.23 will emit warnings in production if a skin using the deprecated mechanism is found.

See Manual:Skin autodiscovery for more information and a migration guide for site admins and skin developers.

Notifications
With 1.23, MediaWiki starts to behave more like a modern website as regards notifications, to keep the editors of your wiki engaged and always up to date about what interests them. This used to require several custom settings. This will allow your new users to immediately start benefiting from the watchlist and email notification features, without needing to first read all the docs to find out that they're as useful as they are.
 * Make preferences "Add pages I create and files I upload to my watchlist" and "pages and files I edit" true by default
 * Make preference "Email me when a page or file on my watchlist is changed" true by default
 * Watch user page and user talk page by default

Merged extensions
Merged into 1.23:
 * ExpandTemplates /
 * AssertEdit /  - documented at API:Assert

Interface

 * Add option to only show page creations in Special:Contributions (and API).
 * Add new special page to list duplicate files, Special:ListDuplicatedFiles.
 * Add new special page listing tracking categories (Special:TrackingCategories).

Editing

 * A new special page Special:Diff was added, allowing users to create internal links to revision comparison pages using syntax such as Special:Diff/12345, Special:Diff/12345/prev or Special:Diff/12345/98765.

Help pages
With 1.23, MediaWiki begins a process of consolidation of its help pages. Now, most are using the Translate extension and can be easily translated and updated in hundreds languages.

In the coming months, we'll focus on making more of the central help pages translatable and on linking them from the relevant MediaWiki interfaces for better discoverability. Please help: add your own translations; update existing pages and cover missing MediaWiki topics.

Traditionally, help pages have been scattered on countless wikis and poorly translated; most of those on mediawiki.org were migrated with the help of some Google Code-in students.

CSS refresh for Vector

 * Various Vector CSS properties have been converted to LESS variables.
 * The font size of /  has been increased to 0.875em.
 * The line-height of /  has been increased to 1.6.
 * The line-height of superscript (sup) and subscript (sub) are now set to 1.
 * The default color for content text (but not the headers) is now #252525; (dark grey).
 * All headers have updated sizes and margins.
 * H1 and H2 headers now use a serif font.
 * Body font is "sans-serif" as always.

For more information see Typography refresh.

Configuration
Add Config and GlobalVarConfig classes:
 * Allows configuration options to be fetched from context.
 * Only one implementation, GlobalVarConfig, is provided, which simply returns $GLOBALS[$name]. There can be more classes in the future, possibly a database-based one. For convinience the "wg" prefix is automatically added.
 * This adds the global variable which is used by the ConfigFactory to create new objects..
 * The RequestContext getConfig and setConfig methods were introduced.

Release schedule
In February 2014, we introduced monthly point releases on the last Wednesday of the month. The anticipated dates for point releases for 1.23 are as follows: