Hello everyone,

we are happy to announce the immediate availability of the Semantic MediaWiki 2.5.0 release: [0,1]. This is a big release bringing a lot of new features and improvements as well as bug fixes.

## Version highlights

* Full-text search in property values introduced

Support for full-text search was added using the native capabilities of the SQL backends "MySQL"/"MariaDB" (#1481) and "SQLite" (#1801) for the "Text", "URL" and "Page" datatypes.

* Provenance data recording introduced

Qualifying facts using a simple provenance model is now supported (#1808) using existing mechanisms in defining a property specification together with a new "Reference" datatype.

* Property chain and language filter support in result printouts introduced

Property chains for conditions (e.g [[Located in.Capital of::Foo]]) was provided for some time, and now got extended (#1824) to supporting the syntax on print requests to retrieve values of a chain member that represent a page node. Values of datatype "Monolingual Text" can now use a language filter (#2037) to restrict the display of a value in a print request.

* Edit protection for better semantic gardening introduced

Edit protection to help avoid changes to properties or other data sensitive pages from alterations that may cause data invalidations (e.g. change of a property type, inconsistent specifications etc.) or process disruptions. This feature integrates with MediaWiki's page protection functionality.

* Preferred property label support introduced

Semantic MediaWiki now supports the declaration of preferred property labels (#1865) with the objective to show labels in a user context on special pages, query results, and factboxes instead of the canonical property label.

* Query result cache for better performance introduced

Caching of query results (#1251) was added as experimental feature to minimize a possible impact of query processing during and after a page view. This change also includes a reevaluation (#2099, #2176) of the query hash (used as identifier) to ensure that cache fragmentation is reduced and duplicate queries can share the same cache across different pages.

* Links in values feature now working reliably

Support for links in values for datatype "Text" was extended by use-cases and improved in performance as well as avoiding the former error-prone "PCRE-approach".

* Fixed properties now a stable feature

Support for fixed properties was overhauled, fixed (#2135) and is no longer experimental.

* Special page "SemanticMediaWiki" formerly "SMWAdmin" overhauled and extended

Special page "SemanticMediaWiki" formerly known as special page "SMWAdmin" was modernized and extended (#2044, etc.) including a new configuration setting allowing for a more fine-granded control over feature accessibilty (#2142).

See the release notes [0] for these highlights and for much more information on the features, enhancements, changes as well as fixes this release additionally brings to you.

## Compatibility changes

Semantic MediaWiki 2.5.0 dropped support for PHP 5.4 and lower as well as MediaWiki 1.22 and lower. See also the compatibility notes [2] for detailed information on supported environments.

## Installing and upgrading

If you are using Semantic MediaWiki via Composer, update the version in your "composer.json" or "composer.local.json" file to "~2.5" and run "composer update". If you are using the tarballs, you can download them here: [1]. Remember to also update your database afterwards by running "update.php" due to schema changes and new database tables. If you would like to install Semantic MediaWiki you can follow the installation instructions: [3].

## Contributors

At this point we would like to thank all people involved making this release possible:

James Hong Kong, Karsten Hoffmeyer, Jeroen De Dauw, Niklas Laxström, translatewiki.net translators, Maciej Brencz, Felipe de Jong, Siebrand Mazeland, Alex Winkler, Stephan Gambke, Toni Hermoso Pulido, Amir E. Aharoni, Felipe Schenone, Jaider Andrade Ferreira, James Forrester, Justin Du, Sébastien Beyou, Virginia Cepeda.

We also encourage your continued contributions: [4].

Thank you to all of you for using Semantic MediaWiki. We wish you a pleasant time and a lot of success doing so.

- The SMW development team

[0] https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki_2.5.0 [1] https://github.com/SemanticMediaWiki/SemanticMediaWiki/releases/tag/2.5.0 [2] https://github.com/SemanticMediaWiki/SemanticMediaWiki/blob/master/docs/COMP... [3] https://github.com/SemanticMediaWiki/SemanticMediaWiki/blob/master/docs/INST... [4] https://github.com/SemanticMediaWiki/SemanticMediaWiki/blob/master/CONTRIBUT...