HRWiki:Upgrade to MediaWiki 1.5

From Homestar Runner Wiki

[edit] What's new in 1.5?

Schema:

 The core table schema has changed significantly. This should make better
 use of the database's cache and disk I/O, and make significantly speed up
 rename and delete operations on pages with very long edit histories.
 
 Unfortunately this does mean upgrading a wiki of size from 1.4 will require
 some downtime for the schema restructuring, but future storage backend
 changes should be able to integrate into the new system more easily.

Permalinks:

 The current revision of a page now has a permanent 'oldid' number assigned
 immediately, and the id numbers are now preserved across deletion/undeletion.
 A permanent reference to the current revision of a page is now just a matter
 of going to the 'history' tab and copying the first link in the list.

Page move log:

 Renames of pages are now recorded in Special:Log and the page history.
 A handy revert link is available from the log for sysops.

Editing diff:

 Ever lost track of what you'd done so far during an edit? A 'Show changes'
 button on the edit page now makes it easy to remember.

Uploads:

 It's now possible to specify the final filename of an upload distinct
 from the original filename on your disk.
 
 An image link for a missing file will now take you straight to the upload page.
 
 More metadata is pre-extracted from uploaded images, which will ease pressure
 on disk or NFS volumes used to store images. EXIF metadata is displayed on
 the image description page if PHP is configured with the necessary module.
 
 If .svg files are added to the upload whitelist, you can choose to render
 them to rasterized .png images for inline display using one of several
 external helper programs. See DefaultSettings.php for SVG options.

User accounts:

 There are some changes to the user permissions system, with assignable
 groups. Note that this does *not* allow you to make pages which are only
 accessible to certain groups.
 
 For details see: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:User_rights

E-mail:

 User-to-user e-mail can now be restricted to require a mail-back confirmation
 first to reduce potential for abuse with false addresses.
 
 Updates to user talk pages and watchlist entries can optionally send e-mail
 notifications.

External hooks:

 A somewhat experimental interface for hooking in an external editor
 application is included.

And...

 A bunch of stuff we forgot to mention.

[edit] What's gone?

Latin-1:

 Wikis must now be encoded in Unicode UTF-8; this has been the default for
 some time, but some languages could optionally be installed in Latin-1 mode.
 This is no longer supported.
 
 You can check if your current wiki is in Latin-1 mode by using your browser's
 "view source"; look for a line like this:
 
   <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
 
 If it says charset=utf-8, you're ready. If it says charset=iso8859-1,
 you may need to convert your data. (English-language wikis avoiding
 any accented characters may be able to get away without conversion.)

MySQL 3.x:

 Some optimization hacks for MySQL 3.x have been removed as part of the schema
 clean-up (specifically, the inverse_timestamp fields).
 
 MediaWiki 1.5 may still run on 3.x, but wikis of non-trivial size should
 very seriously consider upgrading to a more modern release. MySQL 3.x support
 will probably be entirely dropped in the next major release.

Special:Maintenance

 These tools were, ironically enough, not really maintained. This special
 page has been removed; insofar as some of its pieces were useful and haven't
 already been supplanted by other special pages they should be rewritten in
 an efficient and safe manner in the future.