MediaWiki 1.24.0
27 November 2014
MediaWiki version 1.24.0 is now available (major release).
Upgrading to MediaWiki 1.24.0
MediaWiki 1.24.0 can be upgraded to (or installed) using any of Installatron's products. Use Installatron's optional Automatic Update feature to automatically apply MediaWiki updates as new versions are released, or use Installatron's Clone feature to duplicate an existing MediaWiki install to test the 1.24.0 upgrade prior to applying it live. Get started managing your MediaWiki installations with Installatron
What's New in MediaWiki 1.24.0
This is a large release that contains many new features and bug fixes. This is a summary of the major changes of interest to users.
What's new?
- MediaWiki 1.24 includes all changes released in the smaller 1.24wmfX software deployments to Wikimedia sites.
Preferences made easier
- MediaWiki is known to be extremely flexible and customisable, but few users use its full potential. In 1.24, we aim to make dozens obscure preferences easily discoverable and obvious to use.
New features
- Category pages can now be moved (bug 5451).
- MergeHistory for all administrators by default (bug 66155).
- Improvements have been made to the password storage system, allowing improved security against offline attacks should a wiki's database be compromised by attackers. Then, the default password storage algorithm was changed to PBKDF2. PBKDF2 and Bcrypt have built-in support in PHP. The new extensible password API makes it trivial to implement scrypt support if we wanted to.
Usability
- The move feature and other actions are now discoverable in Vector, thanks to a label for the dropdown where they're hidden by default (bug 44591).
- Specify default language on a per-page basis
- Redirect to Special:UserLogin when logging is in required to proceed, instead of showing an error message
Performance
- In 2014, MediaWiki development has a new focus on frontend performance.
- (bug 39035) Improved Vector skin performance by removing collapsibleNav, which used to collapse some sidebar elements by default. This removes -list id suffixes like p-lang-list: instead of using things like #p-lang-list, you can do #p-lang .body ul. If you would like CollapsibleNav back please use the CollapsibleVector extension.