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/COM…
[3]
https://github.com/SemanticMediaWiki/SemanticMediaWiki/blob/master/docs/INS…
[4]
https://github.com/SemanticMediaWiki/SemanticMediaWiki/blob/master/CONTRIBU…