MediaWiki (the software behind Wikipedia) release candidate 1.13 is available now. Try it out!
Jul 26, 2008 by Mircea Goia MyTestBox News
MediaWiki just released the 1.13 version of their wiki software (this is a release candidate which means it’s not recommended to be used in a production environment, just for testing purposes). MediaWiki is a free open source wiki software (server based) which is licensed under GNU (General Public License). It comes from Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia.
Wikipedia, the online free encyclopedia and one of the most visited websites on the Internet, is powered by MediaWiki, This wiki software it is designed to run on a large server farm for a website which can get hundreds of thousands (and even millions) hits a day. It is a powerful piece of software, scalable and feature-rich wiki implementation. It is written in PHP scripting language and uses the MySQL database for storing the data.
MediaWiki writes to a database the pages edited by the users but without deleting the previous version thus allowing easy reverts in case of spamming or vandalism (and that surely can occur!).
It can handle multimedia files (audio, video) and images, which are store in the filesystem. And, to be scalable even more, it can uses caching and Squid proxy server software to handle tons of users.
Check out MediaWiki in action on Wikipedia! (Mediawiki’s website is at www.mediawiki.org)
The release comes with a wide range of improvements:
* Drop-down AJAX search suggestions ($wgEnableMWSuggest)
* New special pages: FileDuplicateSearch, ListGroupRights
* The search box in the MonoBook sidebar can be moved up by editing
[[MediaWiki:Sidebar]]
* More options on Special:Recentchangeslinked and Special:WhatLinksHere
* Double redirects created by a page move can be fixed automatically
* Friendlier behaviour for users who click a red link but can’t edit
* Image redirects are now enabled by default
* Special:UserRights and Special:SpecialPages have been redesigned
* Search results show image thumbnails
* Can hide categories with __HIDDENCAT__
* New parser functions: PAGESINCATEGORY, PAGESIZE
Full release notes can be found here:
http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/tags/REL1_13_0RC1/phase3/RELEASE-NOTES
It seems Mediawiki changed their development model option now for a “continuos integration” model (with quarterly snapshots releases).
Their latest development code is always kept ready to run (and it’s integrated right away in Wikipedia).
The old release branches will still get security updates for a year or so, starting with the first release. But the less important bug fixes and feature developments will be made on the development trunk and show up in the next quarterly release.
Those wishing to use the latest code instead of a branch release can obtain it from source control: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download_from_SVN
Sphere: Related Content
Tags: mediawiki, open-source, php, wiki software, wikipedia
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