MediaWiki 1.22

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MediaWiki 1.22 is an obsolete release of MediaWiki. It was deployed on Wikimedia Foundation wikis through incremental wmf-branches, starting in April 2013. The final, stable version was released on December 06, 2013. Consult the RELEASE NOTES for the full list of changes. Download the latest release or checkout the REL1_22 branch in Git for testing.

There is a list of known issues in the current 1.22 that should be fixed in the next version of MediaWiki.

What's new?

MediaWiki 1.22 includes all changes released in the smaller 1.22wmfX software deployments to Wikimedia sites.

Anti-spam and countervandalism improvements

Like MediaWiki 1.21, we're improving countervandalism and anti-spam features:

The patrolling system has been improved to make the "mark as patrolled" link available on any patrollable page or revision, without having to go to Special:RecentChanges or Special:NewPages. It is no longer necessary to look up the "rcid" URI parameter from these special pages. (bug 15936)
SimpleAntiSpam, a small but harmless shield against the simplest forms of spambots, has been merged into core.

Editing improvements

When comparing revisions in the history or when previewing changes while editing, "(No difference)" is now shown in place of a diff when the revisions are identical. (bug 14431)
After a successful edit, the confirmation message "Your edit was saved." is now shown. Formerly a separate extension (PostEdit), this feature is now part of the core software. (bug 48276)

Upgrades to Vector and other skins

The old Vector extension has been merged into core, and the extension has been discontinued. The new version includes several improvements to both the Vector skin and cross-skin features. (bug 45051) If you were previously using the Vector extension, you must uninstall it (the extension, not the skin) before upgrading to 1.22.

All skins:
- Section edit links are now displayed next to their respective headings rather than along the opposite side of the page. (bug 41729)
- Lists of templates and categories used on the page, displayed below the edit form, are now collapsible. The area with license information, edit summary, and related functionality below the edit field has received a minor graphical lift. (bug 43689)
- An "edit warning" is now displayed when the user attempts to leave the edit page with unsaved changes, on browsers supporting dialogs.
Vector skin only:
- Navigation menu subsections are now collapsible.
- Page tabs can now dynamically fold into a dropdown menu when the browser window isn't wide enough to fit them.

Support for Composer

The Composer PHP dependency manager can now be used to install some extensions. It solves many common problems, including finding where to download an extension, resolving all of its dependencies and libraries, and selecting the right versions. Most MediaWiki extensions do not currently support Composer, but this is expected to change.

Login and signup forms

The new login page

The login and signup forms have a new look and feel. See Account creation user experience/Strings for related message changes.

Upgrade notices for MediaWiki administrators

As with every release, there are some routine maintenance and upgrade tasks that go beyond the primary installation process.

PHP JSON extension now required

Though the minimum PHP version is still 5.3.2, MediaWiki now requires either the native JSON extension or the pecl-json-c fork. Most servers already have this PHP extension installed and enabled. However, if you administer your own server, and the MediaWiki installer says you don't have this extension:

If you compiled PHP yourself with the --disable-all configure option, you may have to recompile with --enable-json.
On Red Hat or CentOS, check for the line extension=json.so in /etc/php.ini or /etc/php.d/json.ini.
Ubuntu 13.10, Fedora 19, and other recent Linux distributions package pecl-json-c separately, under names such as php5-json (Ubuntu universe) and php-pecl-jsonc (Fedora). They no longer include the original JSON extension because of licensing concerns.

Several ancient skins removed

The Nostalgia skin, the oldest skin removed

On April 1, 2013, several ancient skins were removed from core (not an April Fools' joke): Chick, Classic (also known as Standard), MySkin, Nostalgia and Simple. More information: m:Turning off outdated skins.

Nostalgia was the phase I/UseModWiki-like skin, and Classic was the main skin before the introduction of the default MonoBook in MediaWiki 1.3 on May 22, 2004. Dating back to February 2002,^[1] both skins existed over a year before MediaWiki got its name.

Blank system messages must be deleted

Blanking a system message (editing it on wiki to remove all content) will no longer restore the default value for the message, but instead make it show as an empty string in the interface (fixing bug 14176, "Add ability to disable MediaWiki messages"). If you have blank messages on your wiki (check Special:AllMessages), you must delete them unless you want them to display as empty.

Protection rights usage has changed

A new setting ($wgCascadingRestrictionLevels ) was added for enabling cascading protection for protection levels other than "Allow only administrators" (bug 47617). Shortly afterward, the way the "editprotected" and "autoconfirmed" rights work was changed (git #d2477932). In particular, the "autoconfirmed" right is now only used for rate limiting, not page protection. If your wiki has custom user groups with the "autoconfirmed" right, you may need to grant those groups the new "editsemiprotected" right when you upgrade.

Special:Disambiguations has been removed

Special:Disambiguations, a page that listed "Pages linking to disambiguation pages", has been removed (bug 35981). If your wiki used this feature, consider using Extension:Disambiguator, which provides similar functionality and will be bundled in the tarball. Switching to the new extension is easy and generally only requires a small change to a single template.

Bundled extensions

There were no newly bundled extensions in 1.22.

Merged extensions

Merged into 1.22:

Release schedule

In February 2014, we introduced monthly point releases on the last Thursday of the month. Starting with June 2014 this will be the last Wednesday of the month. The anticipated dates for point releases for 1.22 are as follows:

Release	Date	Status
1.22.5	2014-03-27	✔
1.22.6	2014-04-24	✔
1.22.7	2014-05-29	✔
1.22.8	2014-06-25	✔
1.22.9	2014-07-30	✔
1.22.10	2014-08-27	✔
1.22.11	2014-09-24	✔
1.22.12	2014-10-01	✔
1.22.13	2014-10-29	✔
1.22.14	2014-11-26	✔
1.22.15	2014-12-17	✔ EOL

References

↑ r212 and https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2002-February/000120.html

Subpages

[1] r212 and https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2002-February/000120.html

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