I’m happy to announce the first release candidate for Maps 4.0. Maps is a MediaWiki extension to work with and visualize geographical information. Maps 4.0 is the first major release of the extension since January 2014, and it brings a ton of “new” functionality.
First off, this blog post is about a release candidate, meant to gather feedback and not suitable for usage in production. The 4.0 release itself will be made one week from now if no issues are found.
Almost all features from the Semantic Maps extension got merged into Maps, with the notable omission of the form input, which now resides in Yaron Korens Page Forms extension. I realized that spreading out the functionality over both Maps and Semantic Maps was hindering development and making things more difficult for the users than needed. Hence Semantic Maps is now discontinued, with Maps containing the coordinate datetype, the map result formats for each mapping service, the KML export format and distance query support. All these features will automatically enable themselves when you have Semantic MediaWiki installed, and can be explicitly turned off with a new egMapsDisableSmwIntegration setting.
The other big change is that, after 7 years of no change, the default mapping service was changed from Google Maps to Leaflet. The reason for this alteration is that Google recently required obtaining and specifying an API key for its maps to work on new websites. This would leave some users confused when they first installed the Maps extension and got a non functioning map, even though the API key is mentioned in the installation instructions. Google Maps is of course still supported, and you can make it the default again on your wiki via the egMapsDefaultService setting.
Another noteworthy change is the addition of the egMapsDisableExtension setting, which allows for disabling the extension via configuration, even when it is installed. This has often been requested by those running wiki farms.
For a full list of changes, see the release notes. Also check out the new features in Maps 3.8, Maps 3.7 and Maps 3.6 if you have not done so yet.
Upgrading
Since this is a major release, please beware of the breaking changes, and that you might need to change configuration or things inside of your wiki. Update your mediawiki/maps version in composer.json to ~4.0@rc (or ~4.0 once the real release has happened) and run composer update.
Beware that as of Maps 3.6, you need MediaWiki 1.23 or later, and PHP 5.5 or later. If you choose to remain with an older version of PHP or MediaWiki, use Maps 3.5. Maps works with the latest stable versions of both MediaWiki and PHP, which are the versions I recommend you use.