I'm pleased to announce the immediate availability of MediaWiki 1.35.0-rc.0, the first release candidate for 1.35.x, the next LTS version to replace 1.31 which is due to go end of life in June 2021. Download links at the end of the e-mail. The tag has been signed and pushed to Git.

Please note that the PHP version requirement has been raised from 7.2.9 in MediaWiki 1.34 (and 7.0 in MediaWiki 1.31), to 7.2.22 (this may change further, see below).

This is not a final release and should not be used for production websites. Known issues are tracked in Phabricator on the release workboard [1]. As always please do try out the release candidate in a test environment and report any issues that you discover. Please use the #MW-1.35-Release [2] tag in Phabricator when reporting issues specific to this release.

It is expected that MediaWiki 1.35 will become final in late August 2020, and will be supported for 3 years after that.

Known/outstanding issues/things to test:
* It has been proposed to require PHP 7.3 for MediaWiki 1.35, please discuss at <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T257879>.
* Both the Vector skin and the underlying skin infrastructure are undergoing numerous changes, so there might be things broken that are already fixed in master and as such need backporting.
* VisualEditor and Parsoid are now bundled in the tarball and no longer need a separate nodejs service.
* Watchlist expiry (behind the $wgWatchlistExpiry flag) is currently experimental. It should be finished for the 1.35.0 final release.
* If you're on Windows and use 7zip, you may experience issues extracting the tarball. This was noted in the last set of security releases. Try using a different decompression tool <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T257102>.

Preliminary release notes:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/source/mediawiki/browse/REL1_35/RELEASE-NOTES-1.35
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Release_notes/1.35

Open Bugs:
[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/4035/

Bug report form:
[2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/edit/form/1/?tags=MW-1.35-Release

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Download:
https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.35/mediawiki-1.35.0-rc.0.tar.gz

Download without bundled extensions:
https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.35/mediawiki-core-1.35.0-rc.0.tar.gz

GPG signatures:
https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.35/mediawiki-core-1.35.0-rc.0.tar.gz.sig
https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.35/mediawiki-1.35.0-rc.0.tar.gz.sig

Public keys:
https://www.mediawiki.org/keys/keys.html