Hello everyone,

I am happy to announce the availability of the first stable release of the new MediaWiki 1.23 release series.

MediaWiki 1.23 is a large 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-1.23 file for the full list of changes in this version.

This is a Long Term Support release (LTS) and will be supported until May 2017.

Our thanks to everyone who helped to improve MediaWiki by testing the release candidates and submitting bug reports.

== What's new? ==

* MediaWiki 1.23 includes all changes released in the smaller 1.23wmfX software deployments to Wikimedia sites.

=== 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. * (bug 45020) Make preferences "Add pages I create and files I upload to my watchlist" and "pages and files I edit" true by default. * (bug 45022) Make preference "Email me when a page or file on my watchlist is changed" true by default. * (bug 49719) Watch user page and user talk page by default. 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.

=== Merged extensions ===

Merged into 1.23: * ExpandTemplates (bug 28264). * AssertEdit (bug 27841) - documented at API:Assert.

=== Interface ===

* (bug 42026) Add option to only show page creations in Special:Contributions (and API). * Add new special page to list duplicate files, Special:ListDuplicatedFiles. * (bug 60333) 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 <code>#bodyContent</code>/<code>.mw-body-content</code> has been increased to 0.875em. * The line-height of <code>#bodyContent</code>/<code>.mw-body-content</code> 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 GlobalConfig classes: * Allows configuration options to be fetched from context. * Only one implementation, GlobalConfig, 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 $wgConfigClass global variable which is used to determine which implementation of Config to use by default. * The ContextSource getConfig and setConfig methods were introduced.

Full release notes: https://git.wikimedia.org/blob/mediawiki%2Fcore.git/1.23.0/RELEASE-NOTES-1.2... https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Release_notes/1.23

********************************************************************** Download: http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.23/mediawiki-1.23.0.tar.gz

GPG signatures: http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.23/mediawiki-1.23.0.tar.gz.sig

Public keys: https://www.mediawiki.org/keys/keys.html

Markus Glaser (Release Team)