MediaWiki 1.31.0 has now been officially released. This is a Long Term Support (LTS) release, meaning it will receive bugfixes and security updates for a period of 3 years (until June 2021). Below is a highlight of some of the release notes. To view the full release notes, click here.

New System Requirements

MediaWiki 1.31 now requires PHP 7.0 or higher. HHVM 3.18.5+ is still supported, but any users still on HHVM should look into migrating into PHP 7, as HHVM will no longer be supported in the future as Facebook will be dropping PHP support from the product.

More Bundled Extensions

The following extensions are now bundled with the MediaWiki download:

• CodeEditor -- provides a more friendly editing UI when editing CSS and JS pages
• MultimediaViewer -- opens clicked images in a lightbox instead of leading directly to the image page
• OATHAuth -- provides 2-factor authentication (2FA) support using apps such as Google Authenticator
• Replace Text -- provides a special page for admins to perform replacements across multiple pages of the wiki, for both page content and page titles

Upgrading

When upgrading MediaWiki versions, it is always important to take a backup of both your files as well as your database, as upgrades cannot be "rolled back" once performed. It is recommended to unpack the new files into a new, empty directory and then move over needed files (LocalSettings.php, images, extensions, skins) rather than unpacking the new files directly over the old ones. Unpacking over the old ones could cause files that were removed in 1.31 to remain in your directory tree, which could cause PHP errors down the line or cause security issues as those files will no longer be updated. The database changes in this release could take a while to run on large wikis.