[Mediawiki-l] MediaWiki 1.4beta1 released

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 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)