Semantic MediaWiki 7 Released

Highlights

SMW is significantly faster. We optimized database queries and the maintenance jobs that keep your data up to date. The difference can be dramatic on large wikis. In one case, a sorted property query that took 30 seconds now returns in a few milliseconds, and browsing pages with thousands of properties is much quicker thanks to cursor-based pagination. Editing or deleting a widely-referenced category or property no longer forces a re-parse of every dependent page: a change affecting thousands of pages that once kept the job runner busy for hours now finishes in seconds. Pages with language-neutral content are also cached once instead of once per interface language, raising the parser cache hit rate. If you run a big SMW wiki, this release alone is reason to upgrade.

Support for MediaWiki 1.45 and 1.46. SMW now runs on everything from the MediaWiki 1.43 LTS through 1.46, and on PHP 8.1 through 8.5. For the details, see the compatibility matrix.

SMW is easier to install. Installation now follows standard MediaWiki conventions. A plain wfLoadExtension( 'SemanticMediaWiki' ) is all you need, with zero extra configuration. You no longer need the enableSemantics() call, administrators get the smw-admin right by default, and configuration now accepts plain strings instead of the old SMW_* PHP constants.

SMW is more maintainable. We replaced bundled third-party libraries with MediaWiki core services and modernized large parts of the codebase. This reduces the maintenance burden and makes future development faster and safer.

You can find the full list of changes in the SMW 7 release notes.

Companion extensions

Most companion extensions already support Semantic MediaWiki 7:

The extensions still marked in progress do not have a Semantic MediaWiki 7 release yet. We and the community are working on compatibility, and contributions are welcome. The changes for developers and extension authors in the release notes describe what needs updating.

Credits

Over 25 people contributed to Semantic MediaWiki over the past year. We would like to thank all contributors.

Special thanks go to alistair3149, who led this release, and to Paladox for keeping the continuous integration infrastructure running. We are also grateful to Brian Wolff, who surfaced numerous performance issues, and to Niklas Laxström and jaideraf for testing.

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

Upgrading

Semantic MediaWiki 7 is a major release, so it contains breaking changes. The changes most likely to affect site administrators are the raised minimum versions and the installation changes described below. For the full list, including changes that affect developers and extension authors, see the migration guide.

Unlike recent SMW releases, this upgrade does require a few extra steps:

• Run the update.php maintenance script. It converts the smw_hash column to a more compact binary format.
• Remove any enableSemantics() call. wfLoadExtension( 'SemanticMediaWiki' ) alone now loads SMW. If you used the domain argument to set a custom RDF base URI, set $smwgNamespace directly instead.
• If you customized the SMW namespace indexes via $smwgNamespaceIndex, replace it with explicit define() statements placed before wfLoadExtension(). See the migration guide for details.
• If you use the full-text search backend, run rebuildFulltextSearchTable.php to apply the new transliteration.

We recommend that everyone running older versions of SMW upgrades.

Get the new version via Composer:

• Step 1: Ensure the SMW version in composer.local.json is ^7.0.0
• Step 2: Run composer in your MediaWiki directory: composer update --no-dev --optimize-autoloader
• Step 3: Run the update.php maintenance script

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
• Step 3: run the update.php maintenance script

Query Semantic MediaWiki with AI

Semantic MediaWiki pairs naturally with AI assistants. Our MediaWiki MCP Server lets tools like Claude and ChatGPT work directly with your wiki using the Model Context Protocol, and it now includes dedicated SMW support. The smw-query tool runs #ask queries on your behalf, and smw-list-properties lets the assistant discover which properties exist and how to query them. Together they let you explore your structured data by asking questions in plain language.

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.