I'm happy to announce the availability of the first release candidate of the new MediaWiki 1.18 release series.

Please try it out and let us know what you think. Don't run it on any wikis that you really care about, unless you are both very brave and very confident in your MediaWiki administration skills.

MediaWiki 1.18 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 file for the full list of changes in this version.

********************************************************************* What's new? *********************************************************************

MediaWiki 1.18 brings the usual host of various bugfixes and new features.

jQuery 1.6.4 is now included as standard, along with numerous more jQuery plugins.

Breaking changes: * action=watch / action=unwatch now requires a token

As of 1.18, some extensions are now being bundled with the released tarball. The following extensions are bundled with MediaWiki as of 1.18. All are currently in use on Wikimedia sites.

* ConfirmEdit - Various CAPTCHA techniques to try to prevent spambots and other automated tools from editing your wiki. * Gadgets - A system to allow users to enable or disable JavaScript or CSS tools made available to users site-wide. * Nuke - A special page allowing administrators to mass-delete content added by a spammer or vandal. * ParserFunctions - Additional parser functions (like #if and #switch to supplement the "magic words" present in MediaWiki. * Renameuser - A special page which allows authorized users to rename user accounts. * Vector - Enhancements to the Vector skin. * WikiEditor - An improved and customizable editing toolbar developed along the Vector skin.

Major features - --------------

Better gender support -- ---------------------

Until version 1.17, MediaWiki used neutral nouns to address and identify users on their user page. In English, this was not an issue since "User" matches both genders, but in some languages the neutral gender is always masculine; for example, this would cause French-speaking female Wikipedia users to be referred to as "Utilisateur" (male user) instead of "Utilisatrice" (female user). With version 1.18, user pages reflect the user's gender, if they have specified it in their preferences. More gender support (for instance in logs and user lists) will be available in MediaWiki 1.19.

Improved file metadata support -- -----------------------------

MediaWiki now detects the camera orientation from Exif metadata, and rotates the picture preview accordingly. The original file remains unchanged.

The overall metadata support in MediaWiki has been greatly extended. Previously, MediaWiki could only extract limited Exif metadata, and showed a subset of it on file description pages. Since 1.18, MediaWiki can extract IPTC and XMP metadata from uploaded files, and more Exif information. This includes an embedded description, author information, GPS coordinates, or copyright statement.

Improved directionality support -- -------------------------------

A lot of work has been done to fix directionality bugs (Left-To-Right, Right-To-Left). Most notably bug 6100 is fixed, which allows to display an RTL interface on an LTR wiki properly (and vice versa). This was developed under $wgBetterDirectionality, which is now no longer used because the improvements are merged with the core code.

A positive consequence is that the page content on wikis with multiple scripts is aligned according to the direction of the selected variant. For example, on a Kazakh language wiki, selecting the Arabic script variant will align the text as RTL, while selecting the Latin or Cyrillic variant will align it as LTR.

Easily find where to customize interface messages -- ---------------------------------------------

MediaWiki allows you to customize the user interface by editing pages in the MediaWiki namespace. However, even though they can be viewed at Special:AllMessages] the sheer number of these messages makes it difficult to find which one needs to be customized. In MediaWiki 1.18, a new pseudo-language is introduced (qqx) to help people find such messages, by displaying the messages' key instead of the actual messages. All one has to do is append ?uselang=qqx to the page's index.php/ URL (see https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki_1.18&uselang=qqx as an example).

New plugin for collapsible elements -- -----------------------------------

The new jQuery.makeCollapsible allows you to create collapsible tables, lists and so on, by adding the class mw-collapsible to the elements. See the manual for details: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Collapsible_elements

Protocol-relative URLs -- ----------------------

MediaWiki now supports protocol- relative URLs in links, interwiki targets and $wgServer. Protocol-relative URLs look like //example.com/wiki/Foo ; the browser will recognize this as http://example.com/wiki/Foo when following a link from an HTTP page, and https://example.com/wiki/Foo when following a link from an HTTPS page. This way, protocol-relative URLs enable a wiki to support HTTP and HTTPS while serving the same HTML for both, which means the parser cache doesn't have to be split.

More personalisable styles and scripts -- --------------------------------------

MediaWiki now automatically loads javascript and stylesheets more specific to each user. There is a separate CSS and JS file for each usergroup (MediaWiki:Group-sysop.css, MediaWiki:Group-autoconfirmed.js, etc), and also a CSS file for users viewing without JavaScript (MediaWiki:Noscript.css).

Other changes -- -------------

$wgEnableDublinCoreRdf and $wgEnableCreativeCommonsRdf no longer work in core, and the functionality has been moved to the relevant extensions. See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DublinCoreRdf and http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CreativeCoreRdf as appropriate

Math - ---- $wgUseTeX has been superseded by the Math extension. To re-enable math conversion after upgrading, obtain the Math extension from SVN or from http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Math and add to LocalSettings.php: require_once "$IP/extensions/Math/Math.php";

Language support - ----------------

As with every release, MediaWiki 1.18 brings improved support for languages in MediaWiki, with improved translation and features for the many supported languages.

New languages:

* Angika (anp) * Brahui (brh) * Central Dusun (dtp) * Jamaican Creole English (jam) * Khowar (khw) * Liv (liv) * Kichwa (qug)

API - ---

API bug fixes and new features have been added to 1.18, providing more options for input and output.

* API modules were added to access QueryPage based special pages, to Compare pages, Revert files, and to be able to access other special pages such as Special:UnwatchedPages, Special:MimeSearch and Special:ActiveUsers

* The output of the generated help page has been improved

The API contains a breaking changes against previous releases:

* action=watch now requires POST and token.

Other - -----

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

Release notes - -------------

Complete release notes are at

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Release_notes/1.18

********************************************************************** Download: http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.18/mediawiki-1.18.0rc1.tar.gz

Patch to previous version (1.18.0beta1), without interface text: http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.18/mediawiki-1.18.0rc1.patch.gz Interface text changes: http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.18/mediawiki-i18n-1.18.0rc1.patch. gz

GPG signatures: http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.18/mediawiki-1.18.0rc1.tar.gz.sig http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.18/mediawiki-1.18.0rc1.patch.gz.si g http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.18/mediawiki-i18n-1.18.0rc1.patch. gz.sig

Public keys: https://secure.wikimedia.org/keys.html