MediaWiki 1.24

This page contains release notes for an unsupported version of MediaWiki. Users of this version are advised to upgrade to version 1.42.3 (latest stable), 1.41.4 (legacy version) or 1.39.10 (legacy long-term support version).

MediaWiki 1.24 is an obsolete release of MediaWiki. Consult the RELEASE NOTES file for the full list of changes. It was deployed on the Wikimedia Foundation's wikis through incremental "wmf"-branches from April 2014 to September 2014. The 1.24.0 stable release was published on Wednesday, November 26th 2014. Download the latest release or checkout the REL1_24 branch in Git to follow this release.

MediaWiki is known to be extremely flexible and customisable, but few users use its full potential. In 1.24, we aim to make dozens of obscure options preferences easily discoverable and obvious to use.

• bug 52817

• 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 in gerrit:77645, allowing improved security against offline attacks should a wiki's database be compromised by attackers. Then, in gerrit:149658, 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.
• Addition of a JSON content model to the core. Earlier, it was implemented through an extension.

• 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).
• bug 15484 - Redirect to Special:UserLogin when logging in is required to proceed, instead of showing an error message.

During the development cycle for 1.24, MediaWiki development had a focus on frontend performance.

• (bug 39035) Vector skin performance was improved by removing collapsibleNav, which was used to collapse some sidebar elements by default. This removes -list suffixes like p-lang-list: which means that instead of using things like #p-lang-list, you need to use #p-lang .body ul.

Several new locales have been added, thanks to translatewiki.net translators Amqui, Bachounda, Crochet.david, Filipinayzd, Kuvaly, Malafaya, Moha, Oldstoneage, Paul Beppler, Rberchie, Rinconada, Stephenwanjau, Tifinaghes, Vogone, 아라.

• Algerian Arabic
• Iriga Bicolano
• Cheyenne
• Cree
• Hunsrik
• Kikuyu
• Norman
• Kinyarwanda
• Twi
• Central Atlas Tamazight

• Upgraded jQuery to version 1.11.x.
• Support for register_globals (deprecated 5 years ago) was dropped, MediaWiki will no longer run with it enabled. See this email notification for more details.
• {{!}} is now a magic word that results in |, mainly for use in templates and other complex templates. If your wiki has a template at Template:!, you will need to change the name and update any usage of it. If your Template:! is just |, it can be safely deleted.
• Removed the hook SpecialSearchGo. Any extensions depending on this hook will break.

Starting with MediaWiki 1.24, we're cleaning up the API, and working towards an API 2.0. See the roadmap for more details.

• Rarely used data formats deprecated: dbg, dump, txt, wddx, yaml. These may be removed in a future release.
• Token handling overhauled: the action=query module is now deprecated and replaced by action=query&meta=tokens . Most actions now just take a generic "csrf" token, and the token type is now properly documented in the auto-generated documentation.
• And more! See the RELEASE-NOTES file for a full list.

• The legacy skins/common/ directory has been emptied and deleted as part of the skin system cleanup. Files that have been present in it have been moved elsewhere or deleted (if they were unused). If you loaded any of these files as part of your custom skin or on-wiki CSS/JS, you should make a copy of the old files in a non-MediaWiki directory. See the RELEASE-NOTES file for the full list of moved/deleted files.

• Full support for Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 has been removed. Users of these browsers will not have any JavaScript when using MediaWiki. JavaScript fixes specific to them have also been removed. Additional Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 fixes that exist in pages of your wiki like MediaWiki:Common.js and similar can be safely removed if you want to keep your site's browser support consistent.
• See Compatibility for more information.

• MediaWiki 1.24 no longer uses the skin autodiscovery mechanism to load default skins, instead requiring that the skins be manually loaded in LocalSettings.php, much like extensions (see Manual:Skin configuration#Installing skins).
• This will require you to update LocalSettings.php after the upgrade – a prominently displayed warning message should guide you through the process, suggesting the exact configuration that you need to add. If you're upgrading via a tarball release, that is all you need to do.
• If you're upgrading via git or otherwise from source, note that the skins themselves have been each moved to a separate repository and will need to be installed separately (much like extensions, some basic ones are included in the tarball).

New fields:

• Page_props.pp_sortkey
• Page.page_lang
• Pagelinks.pl_from_namespace
• Templatelinks.tl_from_namespace
• Imagelinks.il_from_namespace

New indexes:

• wl_user_notificationtimestamp on watchlist table

Deleted fields:

• recentchanges.rc_cur_time

The dates for the point releases for 1.24 were as follows: