VisualEditor/changelog/Archive/MediaWiki 1.20

2012-08-20 (MW 1.20wmf10)
The VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.20wmf10 branch deployment on Monday 20 August.

The most visible new item in the two weeks since 1.20wmf9 is the much-improved link inspector. This now guides users to create a link to a suggested existing article, a redlink or an external link, and replaces the previous basic functionality that did not suggest links or inform you if the target of your link existed. We have also improved the save dialogue, streamlining the interaction based on feedback from the design team.

There have also been a number of bug fixes, such as preserving spaces before and after the content in headings and other forms (so that " == Foo == " doesn't have spacing either side of it in the editor display, but doesn't strip them either &mdash; 37935), using browsers' native deletion mechanisms which helps with support for short-cuts and internationalisation (38461), and handling of "alien nodes" (pieces of content that the editor does not know how to edit yet) so that they do not break the rest of the editor when included. However, most of the changes have been improvements to the code architecture to allow it to be re-used and extended to support new 'node types' like categories or tables when we work on these later.

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.20/wmf10 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period on Bugzilla's list.

2012-09-03 (MW 1.20wmf11)
The VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.20wmf11 branch deployment on Monday 3 September.

The team have spent most of the two weeks since 1.20wmf10 working on how the code integrates together, providing clean interfaces between them so new developers can re-use and extend VisualEditor to support new 'node types' like categories or tables when we work on these later.

That said, there have been a number of bug fixes, including better support for RTL languages as part of our work with our Internationalisation colleagues, supporting the use of VisualEditor with the Monobook skin (38154) and making sure we don't appear to support browsers that won't work with VisualEditor (38857). We now support the editing of old revisions through the tool rather than just the latest one (37821), and have updated the code to work with a changed way in which the Parsoid service now operates as it is developed.

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.20/wmf11 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period on Bugzilla's list.

2012-09-17 (MW 1.20wmf12)
The VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.20wmf12 branch deployment on Monday 17 September.

The last two weeks included the annual Wikimedia Engineering all-tech meeting and the Wikimedia Foundation all-staff meeting, so this iteration was in effect shorter than others. The team have continued to spend most of the coding time over the two weeks since 1.20wmf11 working on how the code integrates together. This work will provide cleaner interfaces between components of the VisualEditor, so new developers can re-use and extend VisualEditor to support new 'node types' like categories or tables when we work on these later.

Beyond the API work, there have been a few minor changes to the user interface made this iteration. Firstly, the link inspector now checks for invalid titles like "Foo{}bar" (33094), and long titles in the suggestions box are replaced with ellipses in the middle rather than the end so they can be distinguished (39591). The save dialog's length down-counter has been labelled to indicate it counts the number of bytes rather than characters, as that is what the database holds (40035); longer-term, we may wish to find a better way to show this to users. Finally, we fixed a bug where the table of contents was restored wrongly if a user edited and then cancelled without saving (39753).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.20/wmf12 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period on Bugzilla's list.