Semantic MediaWiki 1.3.0

Version 1.3 of Semantic MediaWiki introduced a number of new features to SMW. This page explains the major enhancements and modifications compared to SMW 1.2.

Upgrading existing installations
Upgrading from SMW 1.2 is easy, though the database setup (Special:SMWAdmin) should be triggered anew. Details are explained in Help:Installation 1.3. It is expected that most SMW extensions will directly work with SMW 1.3 as well, though some might need minor updating too. Halo 1.3 and Semantic Forms should work. In other cases, please check with your extension supplier for details.

New Special:Browse
We have overhauled the interface to make it more readable, and to generally act as a useful Factbox replacement with a concise and less cluttered look. SMW 1.3 disables Factbox display by default, and includes a browsing link in the toolbox instead, leading to the current page's browse view. This behaviour can be configured as described in the installation instructions.

New Special:SearchByProperty
The special page used when clicking on ?-icons throughout SMW is still pretty similar to SMW 1.2, but the search now supports "fuzzy" retrieval to find not just exact but also close-by matches (for properties that are numeric or dates). Again, there are various options to configure this interface.

Here is an example from this wiki.

Improved interface for Concept: pages
Concept pages now look like categories, as can be seen at Concept:English news. According result browsing features for concepts with many results are included. Concepts are thus closer to their idea of being "dynamic categories".

Query caching for concepts
SMW now supports an elaborate mechanism for pre-computing query answers, so as to speed up semantic search on wikis with large amounts of data. This feature is intended especially for large wikis that still would like to offer some complex query results but may not dare to generally allow complex queries in all cases. SMW can now be configured to allow complicated concepts only in cached form, so users can create concepts in the wiki, but results are only displayed when the admin updates the caches. Detailed documentation is found at Help:Concept caching.

Extended translations
As usual, translations have been extended, inclusing support for special page aliases (i.e. special page URLs will be translated in various languages). The latter feature still requires further translations. Please contribute.