Upgrade Problems

Upgrading MediaWiki from one version to a more recent version may involve unexpected consequences. If possible, upgrade a copy of a MediaWiki-based website and solve all the issues before publishing an upgraded version of a live site.

I use subdomains for this purpose. Or a 'spare' domain. The concept is to work on a development version which is online but not public, and only release the upgrade when it is fully functional.

In a corporate environment systems administrators may need to plan a maintenance outage to prevent users from editing a site, but this website is aimed at the individual developing a hosted MediaWiki-based website.

Version 1.39 to 1.43

The process of upgrading MediaWiki from early versions to 1.39, and from 1.39 to 1.43, are described elsewhere.

The main issue was that Version 1.39 will work with PHP version 8.2, but Version 1.43 requires PHP version 8.2.

In a hosted environment only one version of PHP can be in use, so upgrading one MediaWiki-based website from 1.39 to 1.43 is ok, but if you have more than one live site, use more than one domain or subdomain, then the upgrade of one makes the others inoperable. Its all or none.