Micro Design Improvements/status

Last update on: 2012-11-monthly

2012-08-21
Trying to grab some developer time to provide to product design. In the meantime product will be prioritizing tasks based on minimal footprint.

2012-08-monthly
This month saw the creation of the Micro Design Improvements team, an ad-hoc group of staffers who look at small but useful design improvements to make to MediaWiki. Vibha Bamba, Oliver Keyes and Munaf Assaf (with assistance from Howie Fung) worked on the design for our first feature, which simplifies the "edit" window. The team is very grateful to Terry Chay for securing technical assistance in the form of Rob Moen, who has agreed to donate his 20% time to working on this project. In the coming month, we plan to talk to the community about this feature, deploy it, and work on more of the items on our to-do list; if you have any thoughts about our current work or ideas for future projects, please leave us a note on the project talkpage.

2012-09-monthly
Our first project to simplify the "edit" window has now been deployed on the English-language Wikipedia, with design by Vibha Bamba, and Rob Moen & Benny Situ handling development. Our current priority is to fully productise these changes and fix some associated bugs before moving forward.

2012-10-monthly
Several bugfixes were deployed to existing improvements, and work began on a new "Agora" extension to make it easier to productise and deploy the team's work, with Trevor Parscal and Rob Moen taking the lead. Vibha Bamba and Oliver Keyes have begun work on improving the templates that are displayed when the "edit" window is opened.

2012-11-monthly
The Agora extension moves ever-closer to completion, with help from Munaf Assaf, Trevor Parscal, Rob Moen and Vibha Bamba. Several templates on the English-language Wikipedia have been redesigned to reduce interface clutter, with some already implemented.