It’s one of those wonderful times of the year, when we get to branch MediaWiki for a stable release. That’s right, MediaWiki v1.16 has been branched and a release candidate is underway. Those of you following MediaWiki–either as a Wikimedian or for your outside uses–know that 1.16 has been a long time coming. Code reviewing has finally caught up to trunk and it’s high time a release is put forth.
A lot has changed in 1.16 (for the brave, the full RELEASE-NOTES), and I’d like to hit on some of the major things here that I think need mention:
- The Metadata editor ($wgUseMetadataEdit) has been split into a separate extension, MetadataEdit
- Introduced CDB interface for high-performance constant data
- Default output format is now HTML5 instead of XHTML 1.0 Transitional (see $wgHtml5)
- Maintenance scripts got a lot of cleanup and reorganization, AdminSettings.php no longer required
- New hooks
- Major improvements in SQLite support
- Test suite is now at least organized (will see more coming here in 1.17)
- Many many other bug fixes and new features
Hopefully we’ll see a general update to the Wikimedia cluster coming in the very near future, meaning that non-critical bugfixes that have been “Fixed in SVN” will finally see production deployment. The first 1.16 release candidate will be coming soon as well, which I encourage those of you using MediaWiki to download and test it out for us. See what works, what needs tweaking and what’s downright broken. It’s a big release, so we’d like to get as much feedback as humanly possible.
Remember that all bugs goto Bugzilla (recently upgraded and restyled), and more information is always better than less.