[MediaWiki-announce] MediaWiki 1.4beta1 released

[Brion Vibber]

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MediaWiki 1.4beta1 is an experimental release, to help flush out 
remaining major problems in the code prior to a final public 1.4.0 
release. It is not recommended to use this beta on a public site unless 
you're familiar with MediaWiki innards and are willing and able to help 
diagnose and fix problems that come up.

=== New features ===

* 'Recentchanges Patrol' to mark new edits that haven't yet been viewed.
* New, searchable deletion/upload/protection logs
* Image gallery generation (Special:Newimages and <gallery> tag)
* SVG rasterization support (requires external support)
* Users can select from the available localizations to override the
   default user interface language.
* Traditional/Simplified Chinese conversion support

=== Installation and compatibility ===

* The default MonoBook theme now works with PHP 5.0
* Installation on systems with PHP's safe mode or other oddities
   should work more reliably, as MonoBook no longer needs to
   create a compiled template file for the wiki to run.
* A table prefix may be specified, to avoid conflicts with other
   web applications forced to share a database.
* More thorough UTF-8 input validation; fixes non-ASCII uploaded
   filenames from Safari.
* Command-line database upgrade script.

=== Customizability ===

* Default user options can now be overridden in LocalSettings.
* Skins system more modular: templates and CSS are now in /skins/
   New skins can be dropped into this directory and used immediately.
* More extension hooks have been added.
* Authentication plugin hook.
* More internal code documentation, generated with phpdoc:
   http://www.mediawiki.org/docs/html/

=== Optimization ===

* For many operations, MediaWiki 1.4 should run faster and use
   less memory than MediaWiki 1.3. Page rendering is up to twice
   as fast. (Use a PHP accelerator such as Turck MMCache for best
   results with any PHP application, though!)
* The parser cache no longer requires memcached, and is enabled
   by default. This avoids a lot of re-rendering of pages that
   have been shown recently, greatly speeding longer page views.
* Support for compiled PHP modules to speed up page diff and
   Unicode validation/normalization. (Requires ability to compile
   and load PHP extensions).

=== What isn't ready yet ===

* A new user/groups permissions scheme has been held back to 1.5.
* An experimental SOAP interface will be made available as an extension
* PostgreSQL support is largely working, but search and installer
   support are not complete. These are being actively worked on
   and should come in later betas.
* E-mail notification of watched page changes and verification of
   user-submitted e-mail addresses is not yet included. If updates
   are available, this may make it into later betas.
* Log pages are not automatically imported into the new log table
   at upgrade time. A script to import old text log entries is
   incomplete, but may be available by the time 1.4 finishes.
* UI messages may be broken in Latin-1 mode in this release due to some
   minor breakage in the language selection module.


Full release notes:
http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=287326

Download:
http://prdownloads.sf.net/wikipedia/mediawiki-1.4beta1.tar.gz?download

Wiki admin help mailing list:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

Low-traffic release announcements mailing list:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-announce

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

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

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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