Ok, the release schedule got disrupted with all the busy Wikimedia Foundation stuff over the last few months, but we're getting back on track with this release candidate for the Winter 2008 quarterly release, MediaWiki 1.12.

There's a *lot* of updates, small and large... Perhaps most significant is a rewrite of much of the parser, changing how templates and extensions are expanded. Among other things, this should ensure that complex mixes of templates and HTML tables should render more similarly between Wikipedia and default installations of MediaWiki.

For this release candidate, we're very interested to hear back about regressions or problems with the installer / updaters. Note that, as with most previous releases, you will have to run the updaters to apply some database schema updates when you upgrade.

Full release notes: http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/tags/REL1_12_0RC1/phase3/RELEASE-...

Download: http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.12/mediawiki-1.12.0rc1.tar.gz

GPG signatures: http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.12/mediawiki-1.12.0rc1.tar.gz.sig

SHA-1 checksums: ee5c298a667b6fa476a5c6de9ddb4c23f2cfd03d mediawiki-1.12.0rc1.tar.gz

MD-5 checksums: MD5 (mediawiki-1.12.0rc1.tar.gz) = a77fbae59e70f4623564c5d45bb1eb9f

Before asking for help, try the FAQ: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:FAQ

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Bug report system: http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/

Play "stump the developers" live on IRC: #mediawiki on irc.freenode.net

-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)