Mediawiki 1.43

The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

MediaWiki 1.43 is the new Long-Term Support (LTS) version of MediaWiki. The 1.43.0 stable release was tagged on 21 December 2024.

Karsten Hoffmeyer of ProWiki wrote a good summary about key features and changes. For full details see the Release notes on-wiki or the raw text version in the RELEASE-NOTES-1.43 file in the source code.

Compatibility for Semantic MediaWiki is a work in progress as of January 7th 2025, but I was able to deploy the 5.x alpha with REL1_43.

Upgrade requirement notes edit

The OpenSSL PHP extension is required.
If you use the Linter extension (which helps you to avoid syntax problems in your wikitext) pay special attention: while update.php will handle updates to the Linter database table with two migration scripts, they can take a long time to run. To avoid downtime, you can run the scripts independent of the code upgrade - but if you want to do that then you must already be running (upgrade first to) v1.42.

To get to 1.43, we'll be upgrading from the prior LTS version: 1.39. So, it is imperative to understand the changes taking place in 1.40, 1.41 and 1.42.

Upgrade notes for 1.40 edit

See ProWiki's write-up at https://www.pro.wiki/articles/mediawiki-140-is-new and the on-wiki Release notes for 1.40 for full details.

The Renameuser extension is now merged into core - so it must be removed if you use it in REL1_39

There are newly bundled extensions: Echo, DiscussionTools, Linter, LoginNotify, and Thanks.

Maintenance scripts are now called through maintenance/run.php e.g. maintenance/run.php update not maintenance/update.php

Configure your webserver to emit the HTTP header X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff for your wiki's /images directory.

New user-facing features in 1.40 edit

Special:Search can now show thumbnails for results for titles outside NS_FILE. This is controlled via the new onSearchResultProvideThumbnail hook.
A new preference ('search-thumbnail-extra-namespaces') to allow users to control whether to show more thumbnails (per $wgThumbnailNamespaces)
(T324910) On pages using multi-content revisions, the raw content of a specific slot can be retrieved using the action=raw&slot=<role-name> query parameters.
(T313804) The preferences page now provides a search bar to find preferences, regardless of the tab on which they appear.

New developer features in 1.40 edit

See Release notes/1.40

Breaking changes in 1.40

Upgrade notes for 1.41 edit

Like before, see the ProWiki write-up Exploring the New MediaWiki 1.41

And, of course, review the full details in the Release notes for 1.41

Upgrade notes for 1.42 edit

Like before, see the ProWiki write-up Discover MediaWiki 1.42 Features

And, of course, review the full details in the Release notes for 1.42