VisualEditor/changelog/Archive/MediaWiki 1.22

2013-04-01 (MW 1.22wmf1)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf1 branch deployment on Monday 1 April. In the two weeks since 1.21wmf12, the team have worked on building infrastructure for the new features that we are adding for VisualEditor's wider launch as the default way users will edit wikis. This has been primarily in three areas - the data model, the user interface widgets, and the user interaction content-editable "surface". Work on the dialogs to edit categories, templates and media items continues.

The team also undertook its first ever "Quarterly Review", whose slides and minutes detail these designs, the work done to date and expectations for the near future.

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf1 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period on Bugzilla's list.

2013-04-15 (MW 1.22wmf2)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf2 branch deployment on Monday 15 April. In the two weeks since 1.22wmf1, the team have worked on the new features for VisualEditor's wider launch as the default way users will edit our wikis - more details in.

The most significant chunks of work in this period were: "the great annotation refactor of 2013" to more reliably let us extend our data model (46464 and others), back-end work for letting users alter a template's parameters and see the page update before it is saved, and adding initial support for the media item (37870) and category editing dialogs. We made a number of fixes for Internet Explorer to do with selection of and around media items ahead of wider work in this area, better support for complex Unicode when moving or selecting through the document with the keyboard (46794), and changing the integration to avoid over-riding the edit tab's label for wikis that have changed it (42117).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf2 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period on Bugzilla's list.

2013-04-29 (MW 1.22wmf3)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf3 branch deployment on Monday 29 April. In the two weeks since 1.22wmf2, the team have worked on deploying the VisualEditor opt-in alpha to more wikis, and on the new features for VisualEditor's wider launch as the default way users will edit our wikis: Categories, Templates, References and Images.

Fixed a number of bugs and regressions, including the 'bold' button not allowing you to un-bold some text (47680), fixing the link inspector throwing out "undefined" in some cases and other issues (47413), cleaning up the deployment including making the feedback link language-variable and having VE allow users preferences on non-deployed wikis (42936), avoiding a Firefox bug where shift-right caused characters to be deleted (47711), fixing a failure to let users convert between paragraphs and headings when next to an inline node (41203), and changing the integration so that the VisualEditor is now the editor behind the "Edit" tab (47396).

Additionally, we adjusted our code that faces Parsoid to adapt to changes there and not fail when editing non-current pages (47434), fixed a problem of blank paragraphs getting inserted in some cases (46800), worked around a bug in jQuery that meant that references and other tags were getting corrupted (47417 and later 47737), avoided leaving trailing paragraphs when inserting content at the start or end of a paragraph (46799), made some speed improvements in the editing surface and the back-end (47343), and informed the user when a failure happens on serialisation (47581).

In experimental code that is not live on the Wikimedia servers yet, on images (37870) we added initial support for displaying and editing inline and thumbnail images, resizing of images, selection of images and other generated content with cursor keys (38129), and drag-and-drop relocation of images and other nodes. For references (39599) we added some infrastructure support for references. For templates (39598) we ensured that templates re-serialise to their original HTML if unchanged (47394).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf3 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period on Bugzilla's list.

2013-05-13 (MW 1.22wmf4)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf4 branch deployment on Monday 13 May. In the two weeks since 1.22wmf3, the team have worked on the new features for VisualEditor's beta launch as the default way users will edit our wikis: Categories, Templates, References and Images.

The VisualEditor now lets users edit the contents of  blocks (47907) as if they were normal mark-up - though not the blocks themselves, such as setting arbitrary CSS, which will come later. Work on enabling the editing of categories is almost finished with the addition of a way of setting in the interface (46465), and support for moving, altering and inserting new images and references is also improving rapidly. Progress on template editing is at an earlier stage, with core back-end support mostly finished at this point.

We made quite a few changes to the MediaWiki integration layer. Most obviously, we now use SVGs rather than PNGs for the graphical elements of the interface, so it scales nicely for users who zoom in (48148). The "Edit source" tab now appropriate becomes active when it is being used (47452), appears on all pages, not just view (47776), and the "Edit" (VE) tab now points to the newly-updated page once you've made an edit (47420). The Vector drop-down menu's change behaviour no longer hides it behind the VisualEditor toolbar (48078)

We improved some issues with the Opera browser (47772) and now warn logged-out users appropriately about the consequences of their editing (47842). Pre-save diffs now give a more reasonable message when there are no changes to be made (43754), and now work when the diff is aborted and restarted (44446). Pages that are not wikitext content (such as user CSS or JS items) will now not trigger VisualEditor (47456). We added a new access key for accessing VisualEditor - Ctrl/Ctrl - restoring the regular edit access key to the wikitext editor (48107).

We also made a number of fixes for RTL environments. First, the link inspector now works for RTL environments, but allows LTR content for Web links (47717). For multi-script variant wikis, content displayed with one variant whilst the user's interface is in a second now works correctly (33175). Un-editable blocks ("aliens") now appear in RTL environments correctly (47746). Finally, the "Edit" (VE) tab now appears down-tab rather than up-tab of the "Edit Source" tab (48017).

On the integration with Parsoid, we cleaned up a number of items of code including removing change markers (45061), and fixed some problems with trailing whitespace on paragraphs and table cells being dropped (47712). Content with different names for the same annotation now serialises to the same wikitext (48110), and serialisation of data with DOM elements is now fixed (47948).

Finally, we fixed a number of other bugs, including ugly issues with pawn characters being created in list and paragraph editing (48287, 48286, 47817, and 48346), with indenting and outdenting of multiple list items (48390), and with splitting list items (48386). Categories that appear in sub-sub-pages don't get corrupted when the page is being edited (48408), and in Firefox, we fixed editing a page causing the entire editor to go blank (47834) and non-character keys being interpreted as real ones (48022). Trying to set a link covering the first character of the document no longer causes VisualEditor to crash (47623), and links now don't wrongly appear to extend when you type after them (48171 and 48114).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf4 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period on Bugzilla's list.

2013-05-27 (MW 1.22wmf5)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf5 branch deployment on Monday 27 May. In the two weeks since 1.22wmf4, the team attended the Wikimania Hackathon in Amsterdam, working with the community to improve VisualEditor and help them, and, ahead of VisualEditor's launch as the default way users will edit our wikis in beta, worked on the new features: Categories, Templates, References and Images.

In terms of improvements to the integration with MediaWiki, we have a number of changes. When the diff result is null because we think you've made no changes, we say so rather than give a confusing blank diff table (43754); wikitext edit conflict handling is now integrated into the save dialog rather than punting you out of VisualEditor (42522); minor edit checkboxes get pre-set (48347), and you get a warning about not having set an edit summary (47752), based on your preferences; when editing old revisions, you are now warned about this (47683); we now show "Editing …" in the browser title when in VisualEditor, like for the wikitext editor, so that it's clear which of your tabs is editing (48272).

We give a better error message if Parsoid is unavailable during diffs (47581). If the edit token we're using is detected as invalid, we ask for a new one (42984). The edit summary field correctly counts the number of characters entered when using non-ASCII characters (47718). The  message is now shown in the content language, rather than the user language (47730). We now won't load for pages which are redirects as they can't yet be edited (47329). We show "create source" rather than "edit source" for the wikitext editor tab for non-existent pages (47421). We don't disable the save dialog when editing a prior revision (48584). Pre-formatted text blocks now word-wrap rather than character-wrap (38043).

Auto-selection expansion now behaves at the ends of paragraphs as elsewhere (48487), and the link inspector now understands that the first characters of links being auto-capitalised based on wiki context doesn't make them different links (48476). The toolbar clears floated items to avoid mis-alignment (48734). VisualEditor should now work with non-BMP Unicode characters (48630). Finally, we fixed a couple of breaks in the link inspector button (48509 and 48549), in pasting text (48602 and 48603), and some problems when moving back to read mode whilst VisualEditor was loading (48520 and 47813).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf5 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period on Bugzilla's list.

2013-06-06 (MW 1.22wmf6)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf6 branch deployment on Thursday 6 June. In the ten days weeks since 1.22wmf5, the team worked on new features ahead of VisualEditor's launch as the default way users will edit our wikis in beta.

The most noticeable change for users is that it is now possible to set, edit and remove the categories that a page belongs to and its "default sort" key, as part of the new "page settings" dialog that can be opened from the button on the toolbar. For now, this dialog covers categories and a simple listing of language links, but will be expanded to cover other "meta-data" like a page having the table of contents disabled, and integration with Wikidata's language links system. Work also continued on the other three critical areas ahead of the release - Templates, References and Images - and we hope to release these in the next week or two.

The way that known browsers are supported changed slightly; browsers are now only blacklisted if we know that they cause significant problems, like Internet Explorer version 8 and below. If your browser is not known, you will get a notice alerting you to this issue (38128). We have added further support in our back-end for multi-character "grapheme clusters", which means that wikis that use extended ("non-BMP") Unicode characters can now work (48975). The left and right arrow keys now move in the correct direction in RTL environments (38546).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf6 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period on Bugzilla's list.

2013-06-13 (MW 1.22wmf7)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf7 branch deployment on Thursday 13 June. In the week since 1.22wmf6, the team worked on finishing the new features ahead of VisualEditor's launch as the default way users will edit our wikis in beta.

The most noticeable change for users is that you can now insert images and other media items from the local wiki and Commons - they default to right-floated thumbnailed images with no caption set. Images will also now appear "correctly", positioned in the normal places when editing. We will make it possible to set the caption, as well as convert images from thumbnails to inline or floating on the other side, in the coming week. We also changed the "Save page" workflow to no longer require users to view a wikitext diff before saving (bug 49258), and removed the 'alpha' notice, replacing it with a more subtle beta label (bug 48428). Work continued on ​inserting and editing Templates and References​, ​the other two critical areas ahead of the release ​, which we hope to​ ​​make available in the next week or so.

We fixed some bugs relating to support for multi-byte Unicode characters used by some languages (bug 49246 and 48630) and some tweaks to the category setting interface released last week (bug 48555, bug 48555 and bug 48565). HTML comments and elements that have no contents like some s will now not be silently dropped when editing (bug 48605). You can now use the forwards and back buttons on your browser with VisualEditor as you would expect (bug 43844).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf7 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period on Bugzilla's list.

2013-06-20 (MW 1.22wmf8)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf8 branch deployment on Thursday 20 June (though some code was available ahead of this). In the week since 1.22wmf7, the team worked on the last of the new features ahead of VisualEditor's launch as the default way users will edit our wikis in beta.

The most noticeable change for editors is that you can now add, edit and remove templates. Parameters are edited only as wikitext for now, but we hope to improve upon this in the next few weeks. The editor interface depends on the new TemplateData extension to give editors hints as to what fields are available. Lots more of the interface is coming, including adding parameters more easily, but it's now possible to add templates (and other kinds of transclusions, like parser functions) to an article, so we made it available. The team spent a good deal of time working on performance of the system, both on the local client and in its interactions with the server. It's now possible to edit block images' captions (thumbs and framed). We also added the ability to run an A/B test for new users, which should be coming soon for a random sampling of new accounts on the English Wikipedia. Section edit links now go to VisualEditor by default, with a user preference to always go to wikitext editor instead.

In terms of bugs and minor fixes, the team focused on some issues that were highlighted to use by editors; we are very grateful to the reports we have received from users which have helped us pin-point the issues and their causes.

We removed attribute order preservation that is now unneeded and slows things down (bug 48980). We now use a more generic approach to filter out non-character key presses, which should be more stable (bug 48335). We fixed a race condition when pressing enter several times quickly (bug 43082). We cleaned up the category editing dialog and made the down-arrows render better (bug 49420). Newly-created images get a resource attribute added, so don't appear as "undefined" in the wikitext on saving (49596. Pasting doesn't disrupt the selection now (bug 49551). Closing a dialog with no changes now doesn't undo the last thing you did before opening it (bug 49630). We now ignore shortcut keys when inserting text, so they don't appear as pawns why typing (bugs 49732, 49760 and 49816). The toolbar now floats down to the end of the page, beyond the start of the last content block (bug 48662).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf8 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period on Bugzilla's list.

2013-06-27 (MW 1.22wmf9)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf8 branch deployment on Thursday 27 June (though some code was available ahead of this). In the week since 1.22wmf8, the team worked on finishing the last touches to new features ahead of VisualEditor's launch as the default way users will edit our wikis in beta.

The most noticeable change for editors is that you can now add, edit and remove references and reference lists. This includes editing templates inside references, as commonly used (such as in the English Wikipedia's citation templates system). Some additional features to make this smoother and easier are forthcoming. Section edit links are now provided for both VisualEditor and wikitext section editing for all users. Unfortunately we discovered some major flaws in our support for Internet Explorer, and so have had to re-blacklist them as not working with VisualEditor. Heading levels are now re-labelled to discourage their misuse. We hope to fix these issues and let users of Internet Explorer 9 and 10 use VisualEditor in the coming weeks. We also made some changes to how images would display to make them look closer to their appearance in read mode, and you can now drag-and-drop them to move them around the page.

The team spent a lot of time fixing bugs that caused corruption or confusion when users edited with VisualEditor; thank you again to all those who used VisualEditor and gave us the reports we needed to locate and fix issues.

In the data model, the language support for extended Unicode was fixed to not let partial accents corrupt characters later in the document (bug 49233). If two bold tags appear next to each other, we will combine them rather than leave them hanging (bug 48194). Editing after reference lists is no longer locked for the first line (bug 50132). Captions for images that shouldn't display them now do not (bug 50113). Using the link inspector on its own, rather than on a selection, no longer inserts the link twice (bug 50140). Links can't now appear "inside" each other (bug 50208). References will not get marked as having been updated when they haven't, so they shouldn't get "fixed up" (bugs 50066 and 50059). Similarly, neither should templates (bug 50079). Comments inside other generated items (like references) no longer get mysteriously swallowed up (bug 48605), or when they're inside links or spans (bugs 50060 and 50071).

In the editor and its dialogs, if you've blanked the DEFAULTSORT, we now won't set one to be blank, but delete the request (bug 49724). We no longer block the function of "triple-clicking" to select a paragraph (bug 38011). The link editor (and other items) now work again in references when using Firefox (bug 50115). Template dialogs won't appear blank just because their invocation uses the wrong capitalisation (bug 49493), and if there are multiple names for a parameter we'll show you the main one, rather than its position (bug 49838). You can now select a floated thumbnail image or a template which is the first item on the page (bug 49421). When users add a transclusion block with no templates in it, or remove all the templates in one, we no longer leave a remant behind (bug 49831). Inspector menu buttons won't sometimes display as blank when inside a dialog when using Firefox (50073).

In the user interface and MediaWiki integration, the edit, edit source and section edit links no longer don't work with middle-click, ctrl-click or other modifiers (bug 49993). There were some minor tweaks to how the VisualEditor section editing works (bugs 49563 and 49620). The save dialog no longer has an inexplicable "back" button when you've loaded it once but then have gone back to the document before returning (bug 49481). Disabled toolbar buttons are back to being disabled for animations too (bug 33113). A lot of the floating items of the interface no longer interfere with the toolbar (bug 50096), and they slide down the page when it's loaded rather than stay in place (bug 49853). Once you've made changes in a dialog, leaving it no longer scrolls you to the top of the document (bug 49977). It is no longer possible to obscure the save dialog with the "phantom" selection when you hover over an image (bugs 49275 and 49361).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf9 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period on Bugzilla's list.

2013-07-11 (MW 1.22wmf10)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf10 branch deployment on Thursday 11 July (though most of the code was made available ahead of this). In the two weeks since 1.22wmf9, the team deployed VisualEditor to the English Wikipedia, and prepared for wider deployments for other Wikipedias, primarily by fixing bugs brought to our attention, as well as performance improvements.

We made a number of changes related to how VisualEditor integrates with MediaWiki. Most notably, we reduced by 97% the amount of code that is loaded when a user visits a page before they entered VisualEditor (bug 50612, later moving the browser compatibility check there too in bugs 50608 and 50677). We had to blacklist Firefox versions under 15 due to a number of issues with those browsers (bugs 50534, 50720, and 50780). We now run an internal "sanity-check" to see if it's likely that editing a page with VisualEditor will break things, and if, so warns the user on saving and adds a tag for follow-up (bugs 47521 and 50067). We fixed a regression where the edit tab pointed to the old, not current version of the page after saving (bug 50441), and changed behaviour so it always gets the current page, not the version you loaded, to copy MediaWiki (49943). We now display both a VisualEditor and (on hover) a wikitext section edit link for each heading (bug 49666, which was briefly broken, fixed in bug 50731, fixed for RTL wikis in bug 50543, and pointed to the right version in diff views 50925).

A number of things which used to wrongly overlap each other now don't (bugs 49059, 50159, 50241, 50247, 50324, 50545, and 50652). We improved a little the message shown when an edit is blocked by an API hook like AbuseFilter or spam blacklist (bug 50350 - more on this to come), and if your edit needs a CAPTCHA to complete, like when adding an external link as an anonymous or new user, this is now displayed and can be used (bug 50356). We worked with sysops on the English Wikipedia to supress the edit notice warning when that wiki's local templated edit notice system showed up as a red link (bug 50077), and protected and semi-protected pages's protection notices now are added as edit notices to the page for users to spot (bug 50415). We corrected a regression that caused the accesskey to disappear from the edit source tab (bug 50725). We added a link to the user guide in the toolbar, alongside the feedback button (bug 50476). Dialogs no longer zoom off the page when you type into them (bug 50538). Tags now show in diffs as well as page histories, including the VisualEditor ones (bug 49602).

In the editing tools, most of the work focussed on the transclusion dialog. This now fetches TemplateData for newly-added templates (bug 49778), and doesn't show parameters as being available to add if they are already set, even if they have a space in their name (bug 50715) or are an alias for the extant parameter (50717). Template parameters with long descriptions don't cause the screen to extend, but are cropped (bug 50800). Changing a template makes it re-render even if it turns into a block (bug 49854), and if it has pipes in its wikilinks it no longer re-renders the template with broken links due to over-keen escaping (bug 50801). A number of tools were corrected to work better in RTL, including the link inspector (bug 49416) and tabbed dialogs link the transclusions dialog (bug 49613).

The link inspector now doesn't leave zombie windows around when you close it (bug 49941). Pressing return just before the link inspector opens now doesn't replace the content you selected with the return (bug 51075). Categories with a '.' in their name now can be added again (bug 50702), and ones with a ' ' after their name aren't thought to magically be a new one (bug 50697). Using the formatting drop-down no longer scrolls you to the top of the page (bug 50792), and doesn't hide your cursor either (bug 50338). Toolbar buttons are now enabled at the open of the page only if that makes sense (bug 50141). It is now possible to add new invocations of existing references (bug 49733). Pressing escape now closes the currently-open dialog (bug 49809). If you use the up-arrow to move the cursor under the toolbar, the window now scrolls so you can see it (bug 48787).

Using a list in a 'slug' – a blank line that isn't really there, but provided for your cursor to have somewhere to click between blocks – now works (bug 47947); making a heading in one no longer applies it to the wrong line in Firefox (bug 48464). Pressing return in the place before a heading doesn't move your cursor one character into the heading any more (bugs 48735 and 48847). Blue rectangles that used to sometimes appear oddly at the top-left of the screen now shouldn't (bug 49818). Floated templates now don't render oddly inside the editor (bug 49925). Undoing image resizing now does indeed undo the action (bug 50682). Keyboard-based selection is now more reliable in Firefox (bug 48289). Merging paragraphs now works even if there's something unrecognised at the end of the line (bug 48366).

We fixed a number of bugs that could occasionally corrupt pages, including one that moved categories around when the PERSONDATA template was re-parsed wrongly (bug 50120), fixing an issue that made transclusions get re-parsed each time (bugs 50129 and 50253), an issue where categories in templates would sometimes move outside of them when changed (bug 50332) stopping occasional  tags being added when the page contained malformed wikitext (49892). If a page has two or more references with the same name, VisualEditor will no longer clean this up by removing the unused content (50444). Adjacent HTML elements from VisualEditor now merge with ones from Parsoid (bug 49985), and HTML code like now doesn't get silently reduced to a single application of the element (bug 49755).

Finally, we split out the MediaWiki-specific items in our code so that we can manage the code more easily in the future, and third parties can more readily write plug-ins for VisualEditor (bug 45295). The Google Summer of Code work progressed well; the Math extension editor is now nearly available for initial deployment, and the ones for the SyntaxHighlight extension and for setting text language details both made strong progress.

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf10 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period on Bugzilla's list.

2013-07-18 (MW 1.22wmf11)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf11 branch deployment on Thursday 17 July. In the week since 1.22wmf10, the team worked on improvements to VisualEditor as well as fixing bugs and stability improvements.

The "re-use an existing reference" part of the references dialog is now its own pane, and the inserter defaults to a blank new one (bug 51152). The transclusion dialog was over-hauled to have a click-to-add list of available parameters rather than needing a button or double-clicking (bugs 50774 and 51143). When a user types some wikitext, a notice pops up reminding them that this does not work, to avoid users creating accidental s (bug 49820). Finally, some internationalised toolbar icons were added for bold and italic for a number of languages (bug 51330).

In terms of bugs fixed, firstly the blue highlight on templates, images and references is no longer mis-placed (bug 50913). The message for a triggered AbuseFilter filter is now shown in the edit dialog, rather than just its name (bug 50472). Notificatons from the SpamBlacklist are also now shown when triggered (bug 50826). The "Clear formatting" tool now clears links again (bug 50461). If a user takes a while to make their edit, VisualEditor now fetches a new edit token for them rather than leave them stranded, unable to save (bug 50424)

VisualEditor no longer eats away at the end of templates that have a reference defined inside them (bug 50271). Some fixes were made to how dialogs and inspectors appear in RTL environments like Hebrew and Arabic (bug 49546). Backspacing from a blank line after a definition list no longer breaks VisualEditor (bug 50076). Fake references created using  are now displayed in superscript like real references (bug 50978). VisualEditor now will load on pages which have only a magic word on them (bug 50289).

The link inspector doesn't now stay open in a broken way when you move the cursor from one link to another (bug 50895). Re-sizing an image with default size now works again (bug 50645). Typing after a link with multi-byte text before it no longer breaks VisualEditor (bug 51140). We no longer accidentally merge two s that sit next to each other when they have different style attributes (bug 49873), nor do we break when unclosed annotations have HTML comments or categories in their wikitext (bug 51235). Finally, the image insertion dialog no longer shows each image twice (once as File:Foo, the second time as Datei:Foo) when used in non-English interfaces (bug 50158).

Finally, the Google Summer of Code students made good progress; an early version of the Math extension editor will soon be available on MediaWiki.org for testing, and that for the SyntaxHighlight extension and a tool for setting text language details will be soon.

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf11 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2013-07-25 (MW 1.22wmf12)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf12 branch deployment on Thursday 25 July. In the week since 1.22wmf11, the team worked on improvements to VisualEditor as well as fixing bugs and stability improvements.

VisualEditor now will extend a link when users type at the end of a link, but won't do so over a wordbreak character (bugs 49931 and 51463). The configuration items related to Flagged Revisions now appear in the edit notices and the save dialog as appropriate (bug 49699]). You can now edit transparently through  blocks, which will get re-added only if necessary ([[bugzilla:47678|bug 47678). If you trigger VisualEditor from a section edit link, the section's title will be pre-filled in in the edit summary box when you go to save it (bug 50872). When new articles are created, users are now shown the   message (bug 51459). We considerably improved the performance of inserting text into pages (bug 52012). Finally, we added localised bold and italic icons for Basque, Dutch, French, Galician, Georgian, Hungarian, Italian, Kyrgyz, Ossetian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. If your language could benefit from customised bold and italic icons, please file a bug so we can make and set them for you!

We fixed a round-tripping bug that caused templates' whitespace to get corrupted (bug 51150). We quickly fixed a bug that meant that the toolbar buttons didn't work for some articles in Firefox (bug 51986), and another which meant that dialog panels didn't scroll any more (bug 51739). VisualEditor now handles templates that set "meta" items (like a category) and nothing else better (bug 51322). The size of the save dialog is now not ludicrously tiny when using the Monobook skin (bug 50058), and the Flagged Revisions drop-down tool was hidden so it doesn't impact Monobook skin users' toolbars when in VisualEditor (bug 51926). If the database is locked when a user tries to save with VisualEditor, they now get a message telling them as such and an opportunity to try again, rather than a silent failure (bug 51636).

We corrected thumbnail images' display so that they look don't wrong in some contexts (bug 51995). There was an issue that led to the reference list sometimes not being fully populated with references (bug 50094). There was a problem with adding or displaying categories which had a colon in their name, which is now fixed (bug 51902). We fixed a bug when using Opera that caused corruption of categories when a reference was added (bug 50385). Unsetting "minor edit" for users with the "mark all my edits as minor by default" now works (bug 51515). Further, dialogs' buttons can now be activated using the Tab and Shift key commands (bug 50047).

We also fixed a number of bugs that affected RTL environments. Firstly auto-completion for template names now works in RTL (bug 51828), and categories' removal now works in RTL too (bug 51490). Inserted images no longer set their alignment, but instead inherit the default position depending on whether the wiki they are on is RTL or LTR (bug 51851). The location of the inspector menu for floated content now appears on the correct side of the screen (bug 51819).

Finally, the Google Summer of Code work progressed very well; an early version of the Math extension editor is now available for testing on MediaWiki.org, and that for the SyntaxHighlight extension and a tool for setting text language details will be soon.

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf12 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2013-08-15 (MW 1.22wmf13)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf13 branch deployment on Thursday 15 August. In the three weeks since 1.22wmf12, as well as presenting their work at Wikimania, discussing and planning improvements and new featurees, the team worked on some changes to how VisualEditor integrates with MediaWiki, a few minor feature improvements and improving the performance of the system, and fixing bugs and stability improvements.

Firstly, on the integration, the "edit" and "edit source" tabs and section edit links can now be configured more flexibly (which has been taken advantage of on the English Wikipedia). The labels for these "edit" and "edit source" tabs and section edit links (however they have been configured for a given wiki) will be consistent on all pages, even those that cannot yet be edited with VisualEditor like templates (bug 50402). These labels are applied before the page is sent to the user, so they no longer "flash in" for some users (bugs 50542 and 50692). Further, the section edit links both appear at once, rather than only one appearing until a user hovers over the heading (bug 50540). We also made a more prominent welcome notice that appears the first time a user opens VisualEditor (or every 30 days for logged-out users), warning them about VisualEditor being in beta (bug 52366).

In terms of new features, you can now edit references that are defined inside a  block (bug 51741), references defined in templates and image captions will also display (bug 51289 and bug 52427), and nested references now display correctly (bug 50749). We also made some changes to the link inspector to make it faster and simpler to use - you no longer need to press enter twice to set a link (bug 51065) or click as many times (bug 51523), and you are warned more clearly that the title you've entered is invalid (e.g. "Foo{}bar") and so won't let you set it (bug 33094). We made some major performance improvements to deleting text (bug 52013) and scrolling pages (bug 52014), which should be visible on long pages.

You can now add and edit  (code) and   (strikethrough) annotations in experimental mode on MediaWiki.org - coming to production wikis soon (bugs 51590 and bug 51610), as well as   annotations with the same code (bug 52352), and a more general solution for use with similar pairs of annotations built out too (bug 52477). We added a keyboard shortcut for the "Clear formatting" tool: Ctrl or Cmd (bug 51507). VisualEditor now uses the same kind of post-edit feedback message that the wikitext editor uses, for increased consistency between the different editors (bug 39632). Finally, we fixed the last known issues with Opera and so un-blacklisted it (bugs 37861, 47793 and 50813; tracked by bug 36000).

On the bug front, we fixed a number of issues. Firstly, we correct a problem where an ugly error was shown to the user on changing a template if there was an API issue (bug 52483). We now strip leading whitespace from paragraphs, so as to avoid users creating accidental s (bug 51462). A bug that made it impossible to save multiple consecutive references is now corrected (bug 52228), as is one that sometimes didn't get you a new edit token if your current one had expired (bug 51915). We also quickly fixed an issue where VisualEditor would crash on loading a page with a  in it (bug 51948), and a corruption issue which led to categories getting duplicated (bug 52238).

Adding a link on an empty selection no longer crashes (bug 51404); if you press enter too quickly it still works (bug 51415); and the link inspector no longer aggressively picks a link for you in cases where there's only one suggestion (bug 52420). The save dialog briefly attached to whichever dialog you had most recently opened, rather than the main toolbar; this is now fixed (bug 52317), as has the toolbar floated to the top of the screen over the user's personal tools if a dialog had been opened (bug 52441). The link describing wikitext in the warning notice about not inserting it now opens in its own window (bug 52093), as does the link to the user guide (bug 52475). Embedded buttons' inspectors now display correctly, used in the forthcoming equation editor on large equations (bug 52845). Further, once you save the page, we re-enable the wikipage content handlers, so gadgets like those that make tables sortable will work again (bug 51565).

Finally, the Google Summer of Code work progressed well; early versions of the Math extension editor and tool for setting text language details are now available for testing on MediaWiki.org, and that for the SyntaxHighlight extension will be soon.

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf13 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2013-08-22 (MW 1.22wmf14)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf14 branch deployment on Thursday 22 August, though many of the changes were made available ahead of this release. In the week since 1.22wmf13, the team worked on fixing bugs and stability and performance improvements to VisualEditor, with some minor work on features.

You can now add and edit  (underline),   (subscript), and   (superscript) annotations in experimental mode on MediaWiki.org (bugs 51609, 51612 and 51611 respectively). These, along with the annotations for  (strikethrough) and   (underline) which were released last week will be made available on all wikis once the re-design of the toolbar is complete, to avoid them dominating the buttons that are more normally used.

In terms of bugs, firstly, file inclusions which have empty  parameters are no longer corrupted on save (bug 51963). A number of issues related to the undo and redo buttons and keyboard shortcuts not applying to the document were fixed (bug 52113). Inserting an existing reference into the first paragraph in Firefox no longer inserts it at the start of the document, but where your cursor was (bug 52159). Finally, after a significant re-write of some of the core of VisualEditor, a number of bugs related to text input and selection in various scripts and using various Input Method Editors (IMEs) were fixed (bugs 50105 for Arabic; 50346 for Kannada; 50631 for Korean; 51477 for Devanagari; and 52716 for Japanese).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf14 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2013-08-29 (MW 1.22wmf15)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf15 branch deployment on Thursday 29 August, though many of the changes were made available ahead of this release. In the week since 1.22wmf14, the team worked on fixing bugs and stability and performance improvements to VisualEditor.

A major bug that caused rapid typing to get out of sync with the document model, meaning that users of Input Method Editors or who typed quickly would get nonsense in their page, was fixed before it affected users (bugs 53079 and 53360). A change to the link inspector briefly made it impossible to insert links to pages' sections - this is now fixed (bug 53219).

A bug that meant that inserting a reference with blank content created bad wikitext -  - has now been fixed by not letting you insert it when it is blank (bug 53345). Applying a link across a selection that contains an image and some text no longer deletes the image and the text (bug 50127). We fixed a bug where cursoring next to an inline image would throw an exception (bug 53507).

A number of bugs with copy-and-paste functionality were fixed, ahead of a larger re-write that should support full rich copy-and-paste from external sources soon. Firstly, selecting a single node to copy no longer throws an exception (48604). A bug in Chrome that caused the browser to crash when cutting certain selections has been worked around (bug 50043). The document no longer loses focus in Firefox after a node is cut (bug 53362). Reverse selections now work for copy-and-paste as well as forwards selections (bug 51538). For RTL environments, the inspector menu icon now appears on the correct side of the page when selecting a transclusion (bug 50905), and the page loading animated image now has an RTL variant (bug 51401).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf15 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2013-09-05 (MW 1.22wmf16)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf16 branch deployment on Thursday 5 September. In the week since 1.22wmf15, the team worked on some interface changes, fixing bugs, and stability & performance improvements to VisualEditor.

In new features, we have changed the toolbar to be simpler, shorter, and to have the ability to have drop-down groups with descriptions. At least initially, we have moved all but the most basic tools into a single drop-down, including inserting media, templates and other transclusions, and references & reference lists. As part of this, the controls to add  (underline),   (subscript), and   (superscript),   (strikethrough) and   (underline) annotations to text will now be available to all users in the drop-down.

We also added a set of keyboard shortcuts for setting the block formatting: Ctrl sets a block as a paragraph; Ctrl up to Ctrl sets it as a Heading 1 ("Page title") to Heading 6 ("Sub-heading 4"); Ctrl sets it as pre-formatted (bug 33512). The help/'beta' menu now exposes the build number next to the "Leave feedback" link, so users can give better reports about issues they encounter (bug 53050).

When inserting a new link into a blank location, we now additionally suggest lower-case link anchors as well as the upper-case equivalent if you've typed that in, so typing in "iPhone" will prompt "iPhone" as well as "IPhone" (bug 50452). Inserting media files when some content is selected no longer replaces the content, but puts the media item at the end of the selection instead (bug 52460). Inserting a link, reference or media file will now put the cursor after the new content again (bug 53560).

In the reference dialog, the 'Use existing reference' button is now disabled on pages which don't yet have a reference (bug 51848). Newly-added references or reference groups no longer need the page to be saved before they can be re-used (bugs 51689 and 52000). The template parameter filter in the transclusion dialog now searches both parameter name and label (bug 51670).

We fixed a few errors with copy and paste; copying over nodes (like references or templates) no longer inserts additional newlines on paste (bug 53364), and if you copied an item and then changed it, or pasted it and changed the copy, you would get the changed item (and not what you copied) on the next paste (bug 52271). The names of languages listed in the "languages" (langlinks) panel in the Page settings dialog now display as RTL when appropriate (bug 53503).

Finally, our Google Summer of Code students neared completion of their work. The Math and SyntaxHighlight extension editors have both made excellent process, and the team hosted in San Francisco Moriel Schottlender, lead on the tool for setting text language details, for in-depth discussions of how we might improve the back-end to support the tool better.

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf16 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2013-09-12 (MW 1.22wmf17)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf17 branch deployment on Thursday 12 September. In the week since 1.22wmf16, the team worked on better language support, fixing bugs, and stability improvements to VisualEditor.

A number of fixes to copy-and-paste were made, including stopping the copying between editors with wikitext-irrelevant CRs pasting the ↵ as a literal character, rather than a placeholder for a wikitext newline (bug 52096), selecting a single node (like a reference or template) without any other content now can be copied to the clipboard (bug 49396), and a bug-fix specific to Firefox due to a flaw in that browser not considering generated content nodes to be valid copyable material when selected alone (bug 53375).

We now more generically support blocking certain kinds of structures in certain kinds of sub-editors, like lists, which do not work in images, or references, which cannot contain themselves (bug 49657).

Several language-related fixes were also made, including no longer corrupting and inserting pawns ("♙") when inserting non-Latin text, accents, or diacritics (bugs 53680, 53747 and bug 53572). Multi-byte characters on insertion do not repeat themselves forever any more (bug 53012), and using Google Input Tools in Firefox similarly no longer recursively adds words to the page (bug 51847).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf17 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2013-09-19 (MW 1.22wmf18)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf18 branch deployment on Thursday 19 September. In the week since 1.22wmf17, the team fixed some bugs, but was mostly ill or away.

Support was added for scrollable dialogs and drop-downs, which means (amongst other improvements) that when selecting with the cursor in the transclusion dialog's list of parameters for a template, the list scrolls into view (bug 53610). The contents of  HTML entities, including those generated by wikitext (" Foo") now don't have the leading whitespace removed, to avoid corrupting them on save. (bug 54083). Finally, the version of VisualEditor running is now not displayed as simply "false" on the product cluster due to the configuration there, but hidden if not available (bug 53050).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf18 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2013-09-26 (MW 1.22wmf19)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf19 branch deployment on Thursday 26 September. In the week since 1.22wmf18, the team worked on fixing bugs and stability improvements to VisualEditor.

You can now drag-and-drop elements other than just images - references, reference lists, templates and other "nodes" should all be moveable with the mouse. Blanking the contents of a heading, pre-formatted block or other formatting block now deletes the block rather than leaving it empty, which is consistent with how OpenOffice and Google Docs behave (bug 50254).

The page settings dialog was briefly broken in Firefox but now is restored (bug 54322). A bug that meant that unnamed references got their names corrupted on using VisualEditor has also been fixed (bug 54341). A regression in copy-and-paste which meant that copy-and-paste stopped working outside VE even once it was closed was corrected (bug 54375), and the functionality was fixed to allow pasting images in Firefox (bug 54377).

Links are no longer possible to be applied to images, as this isn't possible to represent in wikitext (bug 53151). A bug which means that VisualEditor selected both the "slug" (blank line) and the infobox at the start of an article on initialisation was fixed (bug 54446).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf19 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2013-10-03 (MW 1.22wmf20)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf20 branch deployment on Thursday 3 October. In the week since 1.22wmf19, the team worked on fixing bugs and stability improvements to VisualEditor.

References are now editable when they appear inside a media item's caption (bug 50459), thanks to a major re-write of the back-end (bug 52102) that will help us finally provide proper copy-and-paste support in the near future. We tweaked the wording for the warning message that appears for a blank reference list of the default group, and no longer talk about 'the group ""' (bug 51873).

Editing in the "slug" at the start of a page no longer shows up a pawn character ("♙") in some circumstances (bug 54791). In Firefox, blanking the page using select-all and then delete used to break editing; this is now fixed (bug 50947). Generated content blocks which get re-rendered as they are updated, like the experimental (and available on MediaWiki.org) formula editor now doesn't cause the inspector to judder to the beginning and back when updating the image (bug 54584).

There were a number of urgent fixes made to the code behind VisualEditor during the week, to fix issues that developed. Firstly, there was a bug that meant that it was impossible to move the cursor using the keyboard away from a selected node (like a reference or template) once it had been selected (bug 54443). Another bug meant that links with a final punctuation character in them broke extending them in some circumstances (bug 54332). The "page settings" dialog was broken twice, first in a way that made removing categories impossible, though adding them worked (bug 54727), and later entirely, though only in a development branch (bug 54928). A broken deployment script meant that briefly VisualEditor was broken for all Wikipedias (bug 54935). Finally, 'snowmen' characters ("☃") no longer appear near newly-added references, templates and other nodes (bug 54712).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf20 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2013-10-10 (MW 1.22wmf21)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf21 branch deployment on Thursday 10 October. In the week since 1.22wmf20, the team worked on fixing bugs and stability improvements to VisualEditor.

When you delete or backspace over a node (like a template, reference or image), the node will first will become selected before a second press of the key will delete it, making it more obvious what you are doing and avoiding accidental removals of infoboxes and similar (bug 55336).

If you hold down the shift key whilst resizing an image, it will now snap to a 10 pixel grid instead of the normal free-hand sizing. A number of improvements were made to the transactions system which make the undo/redo system able to cope better with real-time collaboration, where multiple users will be able to edit a page at the same time in one session.

The save dialog was re-written to use the same code as all other dialogs (bug 48566), and in the process fixed a number of issues. The save dialog is re-accessible if it loses focus (bug 50722), or if you review a null edit (bug 53313); its checkboxes for minor edit, watch the page, and flagged revisions options now layout much more cleanly (bug 52175), and the tab order of the buttons is now closer to what users will expect (bug 51918).

The code for the action buttons on the right (RTL environments: left) of the toolbar was re-written slightly to improve its flexibility. The display of the help and edit notice menus is now improved, including the addition of a close button (bug 52386). The width of the format drop-down was made adjustable so that long labels don't cause it to break (bug 54870), and a bug that caused the toolbar's menus to get shorter or even blank when scrolled down the page in Firefox is now fixed (bug 55343).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf21 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2013-10-17 (MW 1.22wmf22)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf22 branch deployment on Thursday 17 October. In the week since 1.22wmf21, the team worked on some feature changes, infrastructure improvements, and fixing bugs.

We improved media item resizing in a few ways. Firstly, inline media items can now be resized in the same way that has been possible with block ones (like thumbnails) before. When resizing a media item, you can see a live preview of how it will look as you drag it (bug 54298). Whilst you are dragging an image to resize it, we now show a label with the current dimensions (bug 54297). Once you have resized it, we fetch a new higher-resolution image for the media item if necessary (bug 55697). Manual setting of media item sizes in their dialog is nearly complete and should be available next week.

Beyond this work, there was a lot of preparatory work done to make it possible to re-use elements of VisualEditor outside of the full VE surface (such as in other extensions or gadgets), which should be completed soon, and adding support for switching extra parts of VisualEditor on in the forthcoming Beta Features extension.

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf22 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.