I'm happy to announce the availability of the first beta release of the newMediaWiki1.19 release series.

Please try it out and let us know what you think. Don't run it on any wikisthat you reallycare about, unless you are both very brave and very confident in yourMediaWikiadministration skills.

MediaWiki 1.19 is a large release that contains many new features and bugfixes. This is asummary of the major changes of interest to users. You can consult theRELEASE-NOTES-1.19 file for the full list of changes in this version.

********************************************************************* What's new?*********************************************************************

MediaWiki 1.19 brings the usual host of various bugfixes and new features.

Comprehensive list of what's new is in the release notes.

* Bumped MySQL version requirement to 5.0.2.* Disable the partial HTML and MathML rendering options for Math, and render as PNG by default. * MathML mode was so incomplete most people thought it simply didn't work.* New skins/common/*.css files usable by skins instead of having to copypiles of generic styles from MonoBook or Vector's css.* The default user signature now contains a talk link in addition to theuser link.* Searching blocked usernames in block log is now clearer.* Better timezone recognition in user preferences.* Extensions can now participate in the extraction of titles from URL paths.* The command-line installer supports various RDBMSes better.* The interwiki links table can now be accessed also when the interwikicache is used (used in the API and the Interwiki extension).

Internationalization- --------------------* More gender support (for instance in user lists).* Add languages: Canadian English.* Language converter improved, e.g. it now works depending on the page content language.* Time and number-formatting magic words also now depend on the page content language.* Bidirectional support further improved after 1.18.

Release notes- -------------Full release notes:https://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/tags/REL1_19_0beta1/phase3/RELEASE-NOTES-1.19https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Release_notes/1.19

**********************************************************************Download:http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.19/mediawiki-1.19.0beta1.tar.gz

GPG signatures:http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.19/mediawiki-1.19.0beta1.tar.gz.sig

Public keys:https://secure.wikimedia.org/keys.html