Semantic MediaWiki 4.2.0 Released

Posted on 2024-07-18 by Jeroen De Dauw

Discover what is new in Semantic MediaWiki 4.2.

As maintainers of Semantic MediaWiki (SMW), we are responsible for releasing new versions. Today we released version 4.2, the 69th release of SMW. This release follows SMW 4.1.3, which was released on February 17th 2024.

Highlights

Semantic MediaWiki now comes with out-of-the-box faceted search via the new Special:FacetedSearch page.

Version 4.2 brings compatibility with MediaWiki 1.40, MediaWiki 1.41, and PHP 8.2. It also improves compatibility with MediaWiki 1.42, which is expected to mostly work.

You can now set the source for queries run via the "ask" or "askargs" API endpoints via the new source parameter.

Bug fixes

Fixed ask queries with a conjunction of negations failing when using the Elasticsearch backend
Fixed property linking for languages with fallback languages
Fixed footer sorting on table results
Improved handling of logos

Credits

Over 15 people contributed to this release. We would like to thank all contributors.

Special credits go to Bertrand Gorge, Niklas Laxström, Mark A. Hershberger, Jaider Andrade Ferreira, Youri van den Bogert and alistair3149.

Upgrading

Semantic MediaWiki 4.2 is a minor release. It contains new features, improvements, and bug fixes. Because it is a minor release, it does not contain any breaking changes, does not require running the update.php script, and does not drop support for older versions of MediaWiki.

We recommend that everyone running older versions of SMW upgrades. Especially if you are running SMW 4.0.1 or older, as these versions contain a known security vulnerability.

Get the new version via Composer:

Step 1: if you are upgrading from SMW older than 4.0.0, ensure the SMW version in composer.json is ^4.2.0
Step 2: run composer in your MediaWiki directory: composer update --no-dev --optimize-autoloader

Get the new version via Git:

This is only for those that have installed SMW via Git.

Step 1: do a git pull in the SemanticMediaWiki directory
Step 2: run composer update --no-dev --optimize-autoloader in the MediaWiki directory

Professional Semantic MediaWiki Services

At Professional Wiki, we provide Semantic MediaWiki services, including SMW hosting, SMW software development, SMW consulting, and various MediaWiki services.

You can try out Semantic MediaWiki via the free trial on ProWiki.