VisualEditor/changelog

For each weekly production deployment, the VisualEditor team write up a changelog of improvements made to VisualEditor.

2015-09-29 (MW 1.27.0-wmf.1)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.27.0-wmf.1 branch deployment on Tuesday, 29 September. In the week since the last deployment, the team focused mainly providing lots of bug fixes and some design tweaks and changes.

Link suggestions will now appear as search results instead of auto suggested list with description (T69156).

We fixed a bad bug which meant user was not being able to select anything further after moving the cursor after a focusable node (comment/reference note etc.) (T113636).

We fixed a bug specific to Firefox and Windows 7 where user was not being able to type Korean with dual script keyboard (T113535).

You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on on Phabricator's list.

2015-10-05 (MW 1.27.0-wmf.2)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.27.0-wmf.2 branch deployment on Tuesday, 6 October. In the week since the last deployment, the team focused mainly providing lots of bug fixes and some design tweaks and changes.

When editing formulæ and other blocks, errors are shown as you edit. This means the editor no longer bounces around when you type something wrong and correct it, in a message under the text box (T113354). This will enable users to discover them easily, and makes the design much neater. There is now a new parameter type for "URL" in TemplateData which will help users put the correct type of value for URL type parameter (T54880).

We quickly fixed a bug which meant the focus would always go to the info bubble (i) while clicking on a text input box (T114562) and we released this fix early, because of the irritating impact on users editing templates.

There was a minor regression where the automatic citation editor was not remembering which tab (Auto, Manual or Re-use) your most recently used (T109525).

We quickly fixed couple of issues that we found during our pre-release testing. One of them meant it was not possible to edit an already saved wrong formula since it was not being visible to inspect it (T114565).

You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on on Phabricator's list.

2015-10-13 (MW 1.27.0-wmf.3)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.27.0-wmf.3 branch deployment on Tuesday, 13 October. In the week since the last deployment, the team focused mainly working on a new feature, on providing lots of bug fixes and on some design changes.

You can now directly upload images with VisualEditor to Wikimedia Commons whilst you edit (T40030). You can select any file from your computer to upload; in the details section of that dialog, you can specify Categories, Description and Date for the image file you are uploading.

We quickly fixed couple of issues around this new upload image feature that we found during our pre-release testing. One of them meant while switching to Search tab from Upload tab in Media Settings dialog it was clearing the input from the upload form which we fixed (T114947). We also fixed the issue of drop down for Categories opening slowly during this period (T114942).

There was a minor bug where trying to re-use a reference that replaces itself was throwing an error, we fixed that (T90476).

You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on on Phabricator's list.

2015-10-27 (MW 1.27.0-wmf.4)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.27.0-wmf.4 branch deployment on Tuesday, 27 October. In the two weeks since the last deployment, the team focused mainly working on a new education feature, infrastructure changes to support IME users, providing lots of bug fixes, and some minor design changes.

The first time they edit, users now get educational popups about links and references which explain how and when to use them (T40031).

The loading bar now shows a slight shadow beneath it to be clearer, in different colours depending on whether you're using Vector or MonoBook. You can now use three further sequences to quickly insert items without using the mouse – typing '<!--' will insert a comment, '{|' will make a table, and '<gallery' will make a gallery. The editor now responds much more quickly to enable the 'save page' button after the first edit you make (T109646).

We found a bug, and immediately fixed and released a solution, that meant the link editor didn't work (T115448).

We fixed the ability to copy via right-clicking on a table cell (T116269). We also fixed a bug caused during development that meant sequences would leave detritus in the document on use (T115380, T114545).

It is now possible to use the SyntaxHighlighter extension as a tool within the visual editor, which we will use in future to make editing formulæ easier (T41621).

You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on on Phabricator's list.

2015-11-03 (MW 1.27.0-wmf.5)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.27.0-wmf.5 branch deployment on Tuesday, 27 October. In the two weeks since the last deployment, the team focused mainly working on a new education feature, infrastructure changes to support IME users, providing lots of bug fixes, and some minor design changes.

Anyone can now switch from the wikitext editor to the visual editor and back as many times as you want (T117713).

We now show the sequences you can use in the help dialog in an "Insert" section, alongside other commands like copy, save or make heading (T117036). When you use find and replace, we now start the search from the initial cursor position, which avoids scrolling back to the top in long documents.

We fixed and released early a bug that meant the new educational pop-ups introduced last week were always showing up for logged-in users, rather than only once (T117083).

We fixed a bug that meant you would get an error thrown if you opened page setting on a page after you'd blanked it (T107553).

We added a feature for showing a widget in an error state, which we will use to flag broken formulæ in the future (T114754).

You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on on Phabricator's list.

2015-11-10 (MW 1.27.0-wmf.6)

TK

2015-11-17 (MW 1.27.0-wmf.7)

TK

2015-12-08 (MW 1.27.0-wmf.8)

TK

2015-12-15 (MW 1.27.0-wmf.9)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.27.0-wmf.9 branch deployment on Tuesday, 15 December. In the week since the last deployment, the team focused mainly on merging the two edit tabs into one, which will be available for testing after the New Year, and lots of smaller feature and bug fixes.

Work on the single edit tab feature continues, which will replace the extra 'edit' tab with the ability to remember which editor you used last. Users will be able to set a preference to never or always try to use the visual editor, or show both tabs if they so wish. The feature is now available in a very early form for initial testing on test2.wikipedia.org. Further changes will be coming before the full task is completed, after which we will seek feedback before commencing a staged deployment of the feature to each wiki (T120867.

We released early a fixed to a bug arising from a fix last week which meant that galleries displayed oddly (T121557); our apologies.

We fixed a bug where the educational pop-ups that show the first time you edit could be obscured by other things in the interface (T119923).

There was a bug which meant that when a link was deleted and replaced with text the screen wouldn't match what was saved; this is now fixed (T99139).

Internally, the code for creating a visual editor widget was re-written to let other tools like Flow re-use it more easily (T92661).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.27.0-wmf.9 changelog, and all tasks closed in this period are on Phabricator's list.

2016-01-12 (MW 1.27.0-wmf.10)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.27.0-wmf.10 branch deployment on Tuesday, 12 January. In the four weeks since the last deployment, the team focused mainly on merging the two edit tabs into one, few smaller features and bug fixes.

The context menu for formulæ now shows two edit buttons: 'Quick Edit' and 'Edit'. Quick Edit will let user edit the formula inline, without displaying the large menu with mathematical symbols; Edit will open the full large dialog to let you change the formula (T117949). All wikis where the visual editor is installed will now by default show new users the Welcome dialog (this was already the case for all Wikimedia wikis).

We quickly fixed and released the fix for a bug around Single Edit Tab during testing phase which meant then when a user had the option "Show me both edit tabs" enabled in the Preferences section, switching to wikitext editor was showing a blank page (T121308).

There was a bug which was causing text inside Reference and Media dialog to appear without any left margin, we fixed that (T99139). The bug which meant when user tries to insert a formula for the first time there is no input box appearing inside math dialog has been fixed ( T120898).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.27.0-wmf.10 changelog, and all tasks closed in this period are on Phabricator's list.

2016-01-19 (MW 1.27.0-wmf.11)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.27.0-wmf.11 branch deployment on Tuesday, 19 January (and then again on 26 January after issues unrelated to these changes). In the week since the last deployment, the team focused mainly on merging the two edit tabs into one, with a few smaller features and bug fixes.

When you merge multiple cells, we now use the first value with content, if the very first cell or two don't have any contents. We made another pair of fixes for IMEs, this time one which meant you had to double-click to write into a table cell, unlike with normal text entry (T123716). Our work to provide a single edit tab interface into whichever editor the user wants continued with simplification and wider testing.

We made some improvements to the TemplateData system. First, the message about related pages (e.g. /doc) now shows as a warning, not an error (T86917).

We fixed a bug that meant centralised feedback wouldn't work on posting to a Flow board if the subject was blank (T120699).

We dropped support for adding prefix/appendix labels to edit tabs/links, a feature we hadn't used for over a year.

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.27.0-wmf.11 changelog, and all tasks closed in this period are on Phabricator's list.

2016-02-02 (MW 1.27.0-wmf.12)

TK