Dear SMW (extension) developers, SMW 1.4 brings a number of internal API changes that will require most extensions to change details in their code. In most cases, it will suffice to change the name of some class or function slightly, and some special parts of code might become obsolete. This can be seen already on SVN (and on the online API docs), but for your convenience, we have now also released an alpha version that is in a working state (hopefully) and that includes most changes that we intend for SMW 1.4. Quoting from semantic-mediawiki.org:
"Oct 26 2008. Version 1.4 of Semantic MediaWiki will largely unify the treatment of "special properties" (like has type) and normal user-defined properties. Both can be queried in essentially the same ways, and new "special" properties will be introduced to allow new features. Together with other required clean-ups, this brings some changes for developers using SMW for their own extensions. To help extension developers in producing compatible updates for their software, the SMW Project releases an alpha version of SMW 1.4 which already includes all major internal API modifications. While many details changed their appearance, upgrading code to SMW 1.4 should in many cases boil down to some search and replace of small code pieces. Details will be discussed on the developer mailing list * Download: http://semantic-mediawiki.org/w/images/semediawiki-1.4d- alpha.tar.gz Users are also invited to test the alpha version, but it is not recommended to use it on production sites yet. In particular, extensions for SMW 1.3 will most likely not work with SMW 1.4 without changes." The main change is that all properties are now represented by objects of a class SMWPropertyValue (see its online API doc), and no longer using Title objects and numbers (for special properties). In most cases, you do not longer distinguish between "special" and normal properties, but the SMWPropertyValue has functions to ask whether the property is one that should be shown to users or not (e.g. if it is internal and has no label at all). This is the main change, and it affects essentially all functions of SMW that take properties as arguments. It is usually easy to fix the type errors that you will get when using these functions with the old parameters. Some functions have also simply vanished (all with "special" in their name are just obsolete). In addition, the interface of SMWDataValue has changed slightly, since it uses the new property objects as well. In addition, some features that are really belonging to properties (getting a properties type) have moved to the new property class. As a bonus, SMW 1.4 offers new hooks that allow you to: * Add your own pre-defined ("special") properties in PHP, e.g. to have a pre- declared property or your extesnsion (see SMWPropertyValue for this hook). * Modify the Factbox layout as you like, using your own code to format the output (see SMWFactbox for this hook). Feel free to ask questions if you want more details on some new design or on some required change. Otherwise it is probably also helpful to look at SMW code using the new methods, especially compared to SMW 1.3 code. Cheers, Markus -- Markus Krötzsch Semantic MediaWiki http://semantic-mediawiki.org http://korrekt.org [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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