Semantic MediaWiki 1.6.2

Version 1.6.2 of Semantic MediaWiki is the next minor release after SMW 1.6.1 that brings a number of tweaks and bugfixes.

Note: the #show parser function in this release displays results as a table, which might break your wiki. For this reason, the release download has been pulled. It is advised to either use the 1.6.1 or the 1.7.0 release instead.

Upgrading existing installations
Note that SMW has a new software dependency as of version 1.6.0: the Validator extension that helps Semantic MediaWiki to validate user-provided parameters. It must be installed for SMW to work. Make sure that you include Validator prior to the inclusion of SMW in your LocalSettings.php. Do note that Validator comes bundled with SMW releases as of version 1.6.0. If you are obtaining the code via svn, you will need to get a checkout of Validator yourself.

Upgrading SMW 1.6.x
Installations of SMW 1.6.x can be upgraded by just replacing the files, but it must be noted that not all SMW extensions may already be available in versions compatible to SMW 1.6.2.

Upgrading SMW 1.5.x
Installations of SMW 1.5.* and can be upgraded by replacing the files, and by running the database update (Special:SMWAdmin or SMW_setup.php script) as usual. Moreover, it is strongly suggested to enable the refresh process to update all data on Special:SMWAdmin. Older versions of SMW can be upgraded in the same way, but there can be more feature changes that require changes of wiki pages. See the current documentation for details on using the current version.

Do not forget to also install the extension Validator first and include it in LocalSettings.php prior to SMW with the following line of code. After that you may proceed to upgrade SMW.



Extensions for SMW versions up to 1.5.* should not be assumed to work with SMW 1.6.0 out of the box. All SMW extensions should be upgraded to versions that are compatible with SMW 1.6. Moreover, some functions changed and pages might need updates (see below). Additional remarks on upgrading older SMW versions are given below.

If not done already, it is suggested to change the inclusion of SMW in LocalSettings.php to the following as described in the installation instructions above:



Including SMW_Settings.php as in earlier versions will continue to work, but may be disabled in some future version.

The main user-visible changes in SMW 1.6.0 concern the Type namespace, the use of custom units of measurement (with custom conversion factors), and the declaration of Type:Record properties. Moreover, the support for the RAP (RAP - RDF API) was replaced by general RDF store support. Please see the documentation for details on how to configure this.

Type namespace
SMW no longer uses namespaces "Type" and "Type talk." All types are now built-in and there is no good reason to keep a namespace just for documenting them. A new special page, Special:Types, lists all the available datatypes (and the set of properties of the given type). This functionality replaces the Type namespace pages.

If you still want to use Type (for example to recover text from those pages), you should set $smwgHistoricTypeNamespace = true; before including SMW in LocalSettings.php. This should only be used to move old content to a better place, e.g. to the Help namespace and to remove links still pointing to it. The old namespaces will not be kept indefinitely.

Custom units
The only use of Type pages was the declaration of custom types that would allow unit conversion. The declaration of properties with custom units of measurement has changed in two ways: The internal data format of SMW has not changed for custom units, so stored data will be accessible immediately after the change.
 * 1) The type of these properties is now "Quantity" (not a "custom" type page)
 * 2) The conversion factors that used to be on the Type page are now given on the property page. So one can simply move this text (Type must be activated for this as described above).

Type:Record
The fields declaration of Record properties now refer to properties, not to types. If you have a property with has type::Record that uses a setting like has fields::Page; Number; String then you should now replace it with something like has fields::my page; my number; my string where "my page", "my number", and "my string" are properties in your wiki that have the right types. The use of properties instead of types is better since it allows custom settings beyond the datatype of a field (e.g. conversion factors).

The new method also involves internal changes in the data format, and it is not possible to make the update without temporarily loosing access to the stored data for Type:Record properties (until SMW's self repair has fixed all data entries).

Table format tweaks
SMW now uses the native MediaWiki tables in the table result formats (table and broadtable) in favour of the old style class "smwtable". Thus the class "wikitable sortable smwtable" is now the default class of SMW. This results in faster page load and more consistency between tables in your wiki.

A parameter to customize the layout of the table has also been added: class. This parameter takes a CSS class which is then applied to the table.

Alpha version of new ask API
After many people requesting this, SMW now includes 2 new API modules for doing ask-like queries via the MediaWiki API. Both modules are still in alpha stage, and subject to change in later versions. More info on this can be found here.

Parameter handling changes
Following the introduction of Validator in SMW 1.6.0, it has now been fully put into place and handles all result format parameters. This enables significant cleanup and simplification of all result format handlers, and makes it easier to add in new functionality.

Bugfixes
SMW 1.6.2 closes a number of bugs that have been identified in earlier versions. The more noteworthy ones include:
 * Fixed separator and filename parameters for the DSV format.
 * Fixed display of properties of datatype URL (bug 30912).
 * Fixed hide query functionality on Special:Ask (bug 30768).
 * Fixed display of internal SMW helper constants in certain queries (bug 30969).
 * Fixed some issues with the category result format (including bug 30761).

Extended translations
As usual, translations have been extended thanks to the Translatewiki.net project.