Semantic MediaWiki 7.4 Released

New features

With the new {{#property_search_link:}} parser function, you can link to the list of all pages that have a given property value. For example, on a music wiki, an album page can link to all albums by the same band with {{#property_search_link:Has artist|Pink Floyd|More albums by Pink Floyd}}. See the documentation for more examples.

You can now rebuild the full-text search index in chunks, which helps on hosts that stop long-running scripts. Run rebuildFulltextSearchTable.php with -n to set the chunk size, -s to start or resume at a given subject ID, and --max-time to stop starting new chunks after that many seconds. With --use-job, the rebuild runs through the job queue instead.

Security fixes

This release fixes three security advisories, all rated medium: cross-site scripting issues in Special:Ask and Special:Browse, and a missing authorization check in the smwtask API module.

Both cross-site scripting issues also affect older versions, one as far back as SMW 2.5. Only the latest major version gets security fixes, so if your wiki runs SMW 6 or older, you need to upgrade to SMW 7 to get them.

Some of the fixes tighten input handling, so requests that previously succeeded may now be rejected. Special:Ask also now serves file exports and raw results fetched through its request_type parameter as plain text instead of HTML.

Fewer database queries and bug fixes

SMW caches data such as a property's type and a page's display title. Since 7.0.0, every read of such a value went to that cache, which meant a database query each time wherever the cache lives in the database, as it does by default in maintenance scripts. SMW now keeps the values it just read in memory, so repeated reads skip the query. In our test with 400 pages and a filled cache, rebuildData made 31.2k SELECT queries instead of 48.0k.

This query fix is one of 19 bug fixes in the release. Others restore Page Schemas editing, broken since 7.0.0, and the listwidget format of Semantic Result Formats, broken since 7.3.1. URL values containing a space now link to that URL, rather than to one with an underscore in place of the space.

Credits

This release was led by our own Alistair Kim. We thank the security researchers who reported these issues responsibly, and everyone who contributed.

Semantic MediaWiki is free and community-driven. Please consider donating to Semantic MediaWiki to support its continued development.

Upgrading

You can upgrade from SMW 7.3 without running update.php.

If your wiki uses properties of type URL or Annotation URI, run php maintenance/run.php SemanticMediaWiki:rebuildData after upgrading. Until then, queries on values containing a space may return wrong results. A URL ending in Foo bar and one ending in Foo_bar are now different values, so a query for one no longer finds the other.

If you upgrade from SMW 7.2 or older, the steps in our Semantic MediaWiki 7.3 post apply too. Coming from SMW 6 or older, they include running update.php and upgrading to MediaWiki 1.43 or later. See the release notes for the exact commands and every change.

Professional Semantic MediaWiki Services

At Professional Wiki, we provide Semantic MediaWiki services, including SMW hosting, SMW software development, SMW consulting, and MediaWiki upgrades. If you would rather not upgrade your wiki yourself, we can do it for you.

Request a wiki with Semantic MediaWiki and it is typically ready within 2 business days.