* Made lines from initialiseMessages() appear as list items during installation
* Moved the bulk of the localisation data from the Language*.php files to the Messages*.php files. Deleted most of the Languages*.php files.
* Introduced "stub global" framework to provide deferred initialisation of core modules.
* Removed placeholder values for $wgTitle and $wgArticle, these variables will now be null during the initialisation process, until they are set by index.php or another entry point.
* Added DBA cache type, for BDB-style caches.
* Removed custom date format functions, replacing them with a format string in the style of PHP's date(). Used string identifiers instead of integer identifiers, in both the language files and user preferences. Migration should be transparent in most cases.
* Simplified the initialisation API for LoadBalancer objects.
* Removed the broken altencoding feature.
* Moved default user options and toggles from Language to User. Language objects are still able to define default preference overrides and extra user toggles, via a slightly different interface.
* Don't include the date option in the parser cache rendering hash unless $wgUseDynamicDates is enabled.
* Merged LanguageUtf8 with Language. Removed LanguageUtf8.php.
* Removed inclusion of language files from the bottom of Language.php. This is now consistently done from Language::factory().
* Add the name of the executing maintenance script to the debug log. Start the profiler during maintenance scripts.
* Added "serialized" directory, for storing precompiled data in serialized form.
Enable titles in fixed variants (e.g. -{Title}-), rewrote
the Parser code for variants (do a single query for all
variants of all links, instead 1 query per link per variant).
* Made autoloader work for unserialize()
* Made XmlFunctions.php and HttpFunctions.php autoloadable modules, via Http:: and Xml::
* Made Image class autoloadable, global functions moved to ImageFunctions.php where they can be loaded on every invocation.
* Removed some unnecessary require_once() calls
* Deferred $wgValidSkinNames initialisation
* Fixed a couple of silly construct/initialise splits. My idea from C++ experience, bad practice in PHP.
* Deferred skin initialisation in ParserOptions
* Removed $wgMwRedir during an attempt to make MagicWord autoloadable. Didn't complete that, but removing the global is still the right direction.
* Allow setting the skin object that ImageGallery will use; needed during parse operations (the skin must come from the ParserOptions, not $wgUser)
* Prod a few skin files and increment some cache-smashers
1. Not using anymore the functions wfTimestamp (for {{CURRENTTIME}}) and wfTimestampNow (for {{CURRENTTIMESTAMP}}) for the time magic words, because they output a UTC date; instead, using the built-in function "date" with the parameters "YmdHis".
2. Fix number 1 makes the time magic words OK when using the server default timezone (actually, all of them were OK except {{CURRENTIME}} and {{CURRENTTIMESTAMP}}), but the problem is still exist when setting $wgLocaltimezone, as it isn't noticed. Therefore, setting the timezone to "TZ" enviroment variable like in the signature, getting the various dates and times by "date" function, then setting the "TZ" to its previous value.
