VisualEditor/changelog/Archive/MediaWiki 1.25

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

2014-09-25 (MW 1.25wmf1)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.25wmf1 branch deployment, the first deployment branch of MediaWiki 1.25, on Thursday 25 September. In the week since the last deployment, the team worked on some minor bug fixes.

We fixed with immediate release an issue that meant opening the link dialog after scrolling down the page would disappear (bug 71153). We fixed a bug for users of the Monobook skin, where "overlay" icons (such as for "featured article" status or a geo-location) were appearing on top of, rather than underneath, their selection outline (bug 70074). Categories' hidden status is now saved into the  along with other statuses for efficiency for network traffic.

We made a change to how "slugs" (blank lines where you can drop the cursor) are handled by the code, moving them from the view into the model, which is part of our work to eventually support real-time collaborative editing. In another change to this end, we made an important alteration to how events propagate after a staged transaction is undertaken; we spotted and fixed a number of gremlins this caused, but may have missed a few. The wrapper function  was replaced with the native   function, as non-ES5 compatibility is not intended. The file headers were updated to refer to http://ve.mit-license.org rather than a file in the distribution, to make it more useful for third party distributors to comply with the licence terms.

You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.25/wmf1 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-10-02 (MW 1.25wmf2)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.25wmf2 branch deployment on Thursday 2 October. In the week since the last deployment, the team worked on browser compatibility and some minor bug fixes.

Internet Explorer 10 users will now get VisualEditor if they want to use it. This means that just fewer than 2% of Wikimedia's users will now get a VisualEditor "Edit" tab alongside the existing "Edit source" tab on wikis where VisualEditor is enabled by default, or where they have opted-in to use it. We added support for Internet Explorer 11 last month; work to support Internet Explorer 9 will continue, but at a slower pace.

We found and immediately released a few fixes that would have impacted users. There was an issue with inserting comments (bug 71418), and another where adding and then removing a category would cause the editor to crash if you hadn't applied it yet (bug 71471). We fixed a problem where clicking out of the link editor into some unlinked text wouldn't close it (bug 71373).

We worked around a nasty bug in Firefox where once you cursored onto a note with the left or right keys, the up and down keys stopped working (bug 70724); we also reported the bug upstream for Mozilla to fix, as usual. Users with the "Edit pages on double click" preference can now use VisualEditor without adverse effects if they double click (bug 53058). We made some improvements to selection and cursor behaviour as part of our work to provide table editing support. We now don't try to focus the node using native selection while dragging, which is a hack to work around a FireFox bug when nothing is selected; this broke dragging a selection of multiple lines over a node (bug 71139).

If your cursor is down to the bottom of the page, we now show the context menu and any inspectors above the text so you can see them, rather than try to squish them in which made them pretty useless (bugs 52526 and 71371). We also fixed a bug which broke the editor if the very first thing in a page was an image and you tried to delete it (bug 71187). We added a series of hacks to try to prevent broken browser plugins corrupting page contents (bug 68900); we hope that this will alleviate a slew of bugs, though some may still slip through (bugs 51423, 51521, 52791, 52884, 53252, 61776, 63121, 63229, and 67006).

The OOjs UI library was improved in a number of ways, adding a "MediaWiki" theme that will soon replace the existing "Apex" theme for OOUI as used in MediaWiki, and dialogs now prevent you tabbing outside their box in Chrome and Safari; Firefox already respected this (bug 67156). The  class now lets you over-ride is validation pattern with a custom   function, and it works around a Blink browser engine bug to calculate its height correctly.

You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.25/wmf2 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-10-09 (MW 1.25wmf3)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.25wmf3 branch deployment on Thursday 9 October. In the week since the last deployment, the team worked on language support, preparations for table editing, and some minor bug fixes.

We undid a change we made last week as it had some issues in Firefox, and released this early to avoid disruption (bug 71580). Templates with local wiki links in them will now show them as red if their targets don't exist, like for normal text content you can edit (bug 65353). The various work-arounds for Internet Explorer are now also loaded for the mobile site, for users of Windows Phone devices and others (bug 71622). When you edit a comment, the size of the comment editor now adjusts with the text area as it shrinks and grows (bug 71427). If you try to resize an image to 0 × 0 pixels in the edit dialog the message warning you that that size is invalid now shows again (bug 70861).

We made a major change to how selection works, which will make selecting part of a table and deleting or moving it work better. As part of this, we briefly unfixed a few issues which we then re-corrected (bugs 71823, 71825 and 71832). In the re-write we also fixed a nasty issue which meant clicking at the end of a bulleted list and typing would duplicate the characters you entered to a second place (bug 71827). We also removed some old code related to a previous attempt to improve language support,  (bug 57628), and improved the code quality of the currently-invisible byte counter in the edit summary (bug 56647).

You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.25/wmf3 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-10-16 (MW 1.25wmf4)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.25wmf4 branch deployment on Thursday 16 October. In the week since the last deployment, the team worked on two huge infrastructure changes, some small feature improvements, and fixing a few bugs.

When the template dialog warns you by naming each 'required' parameter not being filled in, it now also highlights them by ringing them in red (bug 70957). The save dialog used to have a byte counter in the corner of the edit summary box; this got hidden accidentally accidentally, and is now back (bug 71837).

We fixed, and released early before it could affect any users, a couple of issues related to an infrastructure change last week. First, there was an issue that meant opening the citation dialog didn't work but crashed the editor (bug 71997). Secondly, clicking elsewhere on the page when the cursor was in certain places would also crash instead (bug 72095). There was another issue we fixed which meant the categories pop-out in the settings dialog didn't close and showed in the wrong place (bug 72052).

A bug which we uncovered and corrected meant that the first character you typed in sometimes didn't go into the "undo" history, and wouldn't trigger the "save" button being enabled (bug 71732). Auto-numbered external links were invisible when inside media captions or references, and now are showing correctly (bug 71652). Some of the icons were tweaked to display with the same shade of dark grey as the rest of the interface after the MediaWiki standard was changed (bug 71541).

We fixed an issue in MediaWiki's search system that meant that sometimes MediaWiki would fail to include an existing page when it exactly matched the search term (bug 70958), which resolved an old issue for VisualEditor when searching for links (bug 51013). One of the improvements that was made in the interface library in MediaWiki last week caused us two have a couple of issues with the drop-down menus used in the reference and reference list dialogs to set the item's group, which we corrected – the box now opens again when you click the open button (bug 72100), and can be closed by clicking outside the box but inside the dialog (bug 72099).

We made a very significant change in how text is inserted when using VisualEditor, the culmination of seven months' work by the Language and Editing teams, replacing the use of chess "pawn" characters ("♙") with images we're calling "unicorns" which takes us much further towards proper support for languages which use certain Input Method Editors which previously had no hope of working. Although the overhaul for language input is not yet complete, this represents a huge milestone in their work. We also made a big, long-awaited long-awaited change to how the system handles the fake empty lines ("slugs") so that they are actually "staged" in the data model, which is more predictable than faking them in the display (bug 65052). Amongst other benefits, this fixed an issue with certain obscure kinds of content inside a media item's caption (bug 63025).

The VisualEditor-MediaWiki internal API used to communicate inside the server is now marked as such, and developers stumbling across it are now clearly advised not not to use it on the documentation page (bug 62452), thanks to the MediaWiki core team's work to make this possible (bug 62905). The OOjs UI library had some minor tweaks made to the MediaWiki theme. The stand-alone mobile demo of VisualEditor now uses the MediaWiki theme of OOjs UI, rather than the soon-to-be-deleted Minerva. The build system for VisualEditor core (but not yet for VisualEditor-MediaWiki) switched from running its internal tests using PhantomJS, an out-dated copy of Safari, to Chromium and Firefox, to avoid some needless backwards-compatibility in the testing and initialisation infrastructure that wasn't used in the rest of the code.

You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.25/wmf4 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-10-23 (MW 1.25wmf5)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.25wmf5 branch deployment on Thursday 23 October. In the week since the last deployment, the team worked on a few new features and a range of bug fixes.

You can now make templates automatically set a field to today's date or other "autofill" computed values (bugs 51428 and 52029). The keyboard shortcuts for items in the toolbar's menus now show on the right hand side to make them easier to find (bug 71855). Clicking edit is now slightly more responsive, starting the loading animation as soon as you click and updating the browser address, rather than after half a second or so (bug 65453). The link editor now shows an open button for auto-numbered external link nodes, just like for link annotations (bug 71904).

We found a very disruptive bug that meant that, in Firefox, cut and sometimes paste did not work; this was deployed as quickly as possible to all users (bug 72164). A bug caused by a wider improvement in the Parsoid service meant that adding or editing formulæ worked but didn't show them whilst editing; we fixed this and deployed it immediately too (bug 71829).

We fixed an issue caused last week which threw errors if you tried to make a media item with no caption which was the only content in the page a link or have a language annotation (bugs 72258 and 72259). We also fixed a problem that meant autofilled template values weren't actually being saved, blocking announcement of the new feature (bug 71157). The improvement a fortnight ago to check links in templates and mark them as 'red' if they weren't pages in the wiki accidentally also looked at external links; we fixed this (bug 72251). Of the four different ways to launch the link editor for a link node, two were instead opening the other link editor (for a link annotation), which didn't quite work; we fixed it so all four use the right one (bug 72150).

Selections which start in a link (or other annotation which provides a contextual tool) now again only show the tool if the selection is fully covered by the annotation, and not regardless (bug 72152). Adding category sort keys, which had broken, now works again (bug 72168). The "make full size" button in the media dialog stopped enabling the "Apply Changes" button, which we fixed (bug 72155). The language editor started appearing in the wrong location, which we fixed (bug 72273). An issue which meant newly-inserted citations would show up with an empty line above and below it in the reference list was fixed before release (bug 72006), as was an issue making inspectors show an unneeded scrollbar in Chrome (bug 72338).

The placement of the category pop-ups was moved to a different overlay to make them display better in RTL. We fixed two old technical debt issues, removing uses of the  method and using instead a safer function depending on context (bug 66206) and replacing use of jQuery's   with native   (bug 62762). A change in the OOjs UI library which broke certain dialog layouts was corrected before release (bug 72278). Like slugs last week, we now use staging for inserting HTML comments and special characters, which makes the inspectors for each show up much more clearly and reliably. We fixed an issue that meant that pasting in Firefox would cause the page to scroll when the cursor is at the end of the paragraph. A MediaWiki-specific hack in how the mobile context works was moved from core into VisualEditor-MediaWiki. As part of the work to support table editing, VisualEditor tools now need to identify on what kind of selection objects they can operate.

The OOjs UI library had a few improvements. The global event handling was simplified when using window managers that aren't isolating their dialogs in s, and window managers now will wait for their windows to be fully open before closing (bug 69918). Comboboxes now work correctly in the MediaWiki theme (bug 71889), and a new progress bar widget is available. Toolbar menus now support only showing a few items initially with options to expand the menu later (bug 70568). Most notably, an early version of a parallel, PHP language port of the library landed, which will allow pages to be created server-side and later as a progressive enhancement made rich with "innervation" on the client-side with JavaScript support. The PHP port will be made available inside MediaWiki soon using Composer, as part of the front-end standardisation efforts.

You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.25/wmf5 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-10-29 (MW 1.25wmf6)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.25wmf6 branch deployment on Wednesday 29 October, as part of a move in the deployment schedule. In the six days since the last deployment, the team worked on a few new features and a range of bug fixes.

When you edit a reference that's used more than once on the page, now VisualEditor reminds you that you're editing a re-used reference so you don't accidentally alter one instead of adding a new one (bug 52792).

We fixed and immediately released two bugs to avoid disruption for users. The first one caused Internet Explorer to immediately hide inspectors when you opened them (bug 72392). The second meant that the warning that wikitext would not work did not show up when triggered (bug 72475).

The position of the toolbar now updates its position better when you resize the window (bug 68916). The "add a parameter" button is now disabled if there's no template to which to add it in the transclusion dialog (bug 63158), and clicking "Apply changes" in an empty transclusion dialog now closes the dialog and removes the transclusion, like for references (bug 72191). When you add a template, we now preview how it will show once it has saved (following PST expansion). The icons for adding more fields in the template dialog went missing, and have returned.

You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.25/wmf6 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-11-05 (MW 1.25wmf7)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.25wmf7 branch deployment on Wednesday 4 November. In the week since the last deployment, the team released a major new feature, improved several other features, and made a range of bug fixes.

You can now edit the structure of a table with VisualEditor, adding or deleting rows and columns (bug 52181), based on the work of the substance.io team working on behalf of the Public Library of Science, to whom we are very thankful. As part of the table editing features we have already provided, you can add new tables (all styled with the  class), merge and un-merge cells (bug 52179), set, unset and edit table captions, and mark cells as as "header" or "content".

As part of getting the code live, we fixed a number of issues with tables (including bugs 72599, 72717, 72724, 72802, 72803, and 72831). In future, it will be possible to edit the settings on a table such as whether the columns can be sorted, set colours and styling on cells, and be able to drag columns or rows to different places. Despite our hard work, we expect there to be some bugs with edge cases, and we welcome feedback. In particular, suggestions about the interface and how we could make it easier for you would be very helpful.

The toolbar now collapses the styling and insert groups, which focuses attention on the most common tasks. As part of this, we have now enabled the gallery and hieroglyphic tools for all users, which are now available towards the end of the "Insert" menu. When you save an edit, the message at the bottom of the page saying when it was last modified is now updated (bug 52403). If you try to "Apply Changes" after removing everything from a transclusion, it will now remove the node rather than stop you from doing it (bug 63341).

We fixed a number of issues which we released immediately to avoid disrupting editing for users. Firstly, there was an issue that meant clicking onto a node like an image or template wouldn't select it if the editor wasn't already active, such as when the editor had just been started (bug 72721). Another issue that we fixed was the cursor still being active at the bottom of the page in Firefox after you exited the editor (bug 71852). Finally, a small gap was appearing above the VisualEditor toolbar, which was caused by a change in MediaWiki which is now fixed (bug 72693).

We fixed a pair of bugs that meant the group drop-down in the basic reference dialog appeared wrongly (bugs 72783 and 72785), and for the search system for inserting a template (bug 72789). There were a few display gremlins which we fixed (bugs 72719, 72792, 72838, 72904, and 72959). We fixed a bug related to backwards keyboard selection in certain cases in Firefox (bug 72835). A recent bug meant that it was possible to add a new category several times for it to then be cleaned up on save is also now fixed (bug 72906).

VisualEditor no longer emits an error when you try to insert a template with an invalid name, like one called "Talk:" (bug 71998), and we took to opportunity to improve how the  code worked to make these kind of issues impossible in future (bug 71249). Clicking on the list tools whilst in the middle of editing a link no longer breaks the editor either (bug 72558). A couple of bugs related to templates, citations and references were caught through our QA processes, and fixed before the software was released (bugs 72948 and 72961).

Inside the guts of VisualEditor, we reworked how dialogs operate, removing their use of  s, which should make the editor faster and less prone to bugs, as well as solving a long-standing technical debt bug about their operation (bug 52486). We prepared VisualEditor for future drag-and-drop inserting of content, including eventually uploading dragged-in images to Commons via the UploadWizard tool. A number of the more complicated and fragile parts of the browser compatibility layer were moved out into a library, RangeFix. The credits given in the  file were refreshed to catch up on the past six months' work.

In the OOUI framework, the width of text input boxes is now variable, which means they will display better in mobile (bug 72112), and a mobile styling hack was removed so that disabled controls appear greyed out as expected (bug 72405). Some problems with the display of link suggestions were also fixed (bug 72402). The documentation of the PHP port and the JS original versions of the library are now kept in sync semi-automatically, with a number of omissions, errors and differences between the two already spotted and fixed.

You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.25/wmf7 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-11-12 (MW 1.25wmf8)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.25wmf8 branch deployment on Wednesday 12 November. In the week since the last deployment, the team improved several features and made a range of bug fixes.

Suggestions for links provided in the link editor drop-down are now real links you can click on and interact with, like in the rest of editor (bug 51205). If the save dialog is busy, like just after you've pressed "save", we now disable the "Review your changes" button (bug 65310). Categories which don't have a description page now show as red in the category panel, like they do after saving (bug 65517). Magic links in templates, like ISBNs, now don't show up as red even though they don't really "exist" (bug 73320). Armenian language users now get customised bold and italic icons in the toolbar.

There were a few regressions which we caught and released early to avoid disruption for users. Firstly, a change last week that affected how commands worked missed a subtlety with the citation commands, which meant that they didn't work (bug 73001). Three issues with the template dialog – that deleting a parameter showed it as deleted in the interface but didn't change the wikitext when saved (bug 73134), the template dialog not getting the focus when you opened in (bug 73138), and the "show options" button getting the wrong label when using the normal "simplified" template editing dialog (bug 73235) – were also fixed. Finally, we fixed and also released early an issue that meant that opening a dialog left the cursor active on the main document surface, rather than in the dialog (bug 73097).

We followed up last week's release of table editing with some fixes. Setting the format of the contents of a table cell, such as to a heading or to pre-formatted, now works rather than splits the table and breaks (bugs 72816, 72990, 73100). Drag-and-dropping a block image now won't prompt you to put it in the middle of a table, rather than letting you split it confusingly (bug 72995). Removing a table row that includes a merged cell spanning other rows too no longer un-merges the cell (bug 73213). Table captions now show up with a faint border so it's clear why the column editing tool appears where it does (bug 72829). The page loading spinner now stays until the whole editor has loaded, rather than part-way through, and the graphic was replaced with a higher-quality one.

On the back-end, most of contents of  are now moved to   which means loading the stub of VisualEditor for logging purposes is now possible without adding unnecessary code to the page payload. VisualEditor now supports drag-and-drop of files into the editor to insert content; so far, this is limited to plain text files. The OOjs UI library's MediaWiki theme now styles checkboxes, and applies a background colour where stating a foreground one for accessibility needs. The OOjs library had a new version, 1.1.2, released, which OOjs UI, VisualEditor and MediaWiki all now use.

You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.25/wmf8 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-11-19 (MW 1.25wmf9)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.25wmf9 branch deployment on Wednesday 19 November. In the week since the last deployment, the team made some minor improvements to several features and a range of bug fixes.

Adding a redirect category now adds the target category directly instead. On wikis using the Flagged Revisions system, the notice saying "1 change in this version is pending review" at the top of the page is now shown when you exit VisualEditor (bug 60718). When you close the save dialog to resume editing, we restore the selection back to where it was (bug 72911).

We fixed a number of issues which we chose to release immediately to avoid disrupting and inconveniencing editing for users. Loading a page in Chrome would sometimes scroll immediately to the bottom because we focussed on the wrong thing; we removed this (bug 73208). Editing a page with incorrect, broken or nonsense values for table's  or   attributes will no longer normalise or corrupt them (bug 73430). Pasting text in Chrome no longer strips the spaces off the text between things that are bold/linked and things that aren't, caused by the browser using the wrong source when copying content to the clipboard (bug 71718). An issue from last week's change to no longer use s meant that the link and language inspectors appeared as blank when you tried to use them inside a reference or media dialog was fixed (bug 73542).

Some further improvements to table editing were made, including some bad UX issues for users of RTL languages like Hebrew (bugs 73378 and 73379). Dragging a gallery node into the caption of an image is no longer possible (bug 73368). Clicking away from the comment editor now doesn't save an empty comment (bug 71706) and you don't have to press "undo" twice to reverse a comment editing action (bug 72315). A bug with Safari that meant the link editor opened in the upper-left corner of the screen, rather than where the user clicked (bug 73336). We fixed an issue that mean selection a node with the cursor keys caused the context menu to briefly flicker in and then out of existence at the position of the last mouse click first (bug 73242). The new system for displaying formulæ being worked on by the Math team now works inside VisualEditor for editing purposes too, and we fixed the display if you're using the new rendering form (bug 72539).

On the back-end, we removed the very old  method which is no longer needed (bug 72156), and fixed a couple of server-side PHP warnings found during an audit (bugs 73463 and 73469). We made preparatory changes for supporting new features in TemplateData as part of our work on auto-filled citations. The RangeFix library was updated to version 0.1.1. VisualEditor no longer uses a hard-coded list comma message, but the system one (bug 66894). The OOjs UI library has a number of improvements, including not closing menus when you click their scroll bars (bug 65774). The OOjs library had a new version, 1.1.3, released, which OOjs UI, VisualEditor and MediaWiki all now use; this version contains upstreamed versions of VisualEditor's  and   utility functions, which are now used through these functions.

You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.25/wmf9 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-11-26 (MW 1.25wmf10)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.25wmf10 branch deployment on Wednesday 26 November. In the week since the last deployment, the team added a new minor feature, made some improvements to several features, and provided a range of bug fixes.

You can now create and edit  paragraphs for quoting and indenting content in VisualEditor (T53009). You can now use keyboard sequences as well as keyboard shortcuts to format content, instead of being warned (for example) that wikitext doesn't work. At the start of the line, typing " " will make the line a bullet list; " " or " " will make it a numbered list; " " will make it a section heading; " " will make it a blockquote. There are also two shortcuts that work wherever you are on the line – " " for making a link and " " for adding a template (T52093, T53408, T53897). If you didn't mean to use the "smart" sequence, pressing undo will get back to what you typed.

When you copy a table, reference or template from one place to another, VisualEditor and Parsoid now work together to ensure that the particular style of wikitext you used – e.g. with or without linebreaks – is preserved (T74426). VisualEditor is now available as an opt-in Beta Feature on most remaining Wikimedia wikis, for testing. We did not make it not available on Wikisources, where some further software development is needed, and Wiktionaries, where the template editing process isn't quite smooth enough for that style of wiki. Due to a typo, French and Swedish Wiktionaries briefly lost their abilility to use VisualEditor; our apologies (T76099).

We fixed and released early a bug that meant you couldn't open the citation dialogs (T75779), and one which meant that Monobook users got very small text (T75660). There was an issue with the code's configuration which blocked VisualEditor from loading in mobile (T75646), and another in OOjs UI which meant that typing into sub-surfaces was broken in Firefox (T75625), both of which also got fixed and released early. Finally, we fixed an issue where we didn't update the formula editor to compensate for a change last week (T75627).

A bug meant that VisualEditor didn't close itself down properly if you made changes and then exited the editor after opening the save dialog (T75589). We fixed the software input method editor supplied by the Language Team to not show up when editing a table cell in VisualEditor (T74824). We fixed an issue caused by a message over-ride on the English Wikipedia that meant the page timestamp was shown with HTML characters after you saved (T75571). The toolbar now shows round corners on both sides of the help menu if there are no alerts like edit notices shown (T63575).

On, the VisualEditor tab now reads as "Create" rather than "Edit" (T68885). VisualEditor now confirms that you meant to re-create a page when it finds that the page was deleted after you started editing (T54073). If the page you're editing has odd, invisible Unicode characters in the categories, VisualEditor won't get confused but will let you edit them correctly (T74080). Pasting external HTML content into VisualEditor now strips comments again, which should help with the mess created when people copy from Microsoft Office (T71821).

The changes to provide key sequences support also means that the wikitext warning won't be shown if the line you're editing has wikitext in it already, only when you enter a new piece (T53751). The wikitext warning now warns you about typing in " " at the start of a line (T71689), and links to the general guidance about wikitext on MediaWiki.org, rather than assuming each wiki will have a local help page (T69273). If you want to over-ride it, change  on your wiki to the page name that should be linked instead.

VisualEditor now defines sub-surfaces' abilities in terms of inheritance from their main surface, which substantially cleans up our code for how the media and reference dialogs work (T51439); a few issues fell out of this change, which we fixed before release (T75942, T75946, T76073). VisualEditor now uses more sensible z-index values for the toolbar and overlay (T75650), and the hacks needed for Monobook are now used just for users of that skin. The styling code to support Internet Explorer were moved into VisualEditor itself, rather than VisualEditor-MediaWiki (T75565). The OOjs UI library's PHP port passed security review (T75156), since which time the library is now versioned; with version 0.2.2 released, which VisualEditor and MediaWiki both now use. This release of the library had a number of fixes made; it now correctly resizes "message" dialogs correctly, showing the buttons in the right place rather than squished together on first open (T75376), properly styling buttons with only icons and no text in dialogs (T75696), and providing radio controls (T74586).

You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.25/wmf10 changelog, and all tasks closed in this period are on Phabricator's list; Wikimedia switched from Bugzilla to Phabricator over the weekend.

2014-12-03 (MW 1.25wmf11)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.25wmf11 branch deployment on Wednesday 3 December. In the week since the last deployment, the team added a new minor feature, worked on the infrastructure supporting future improvements, and provided a range of bug fixes.

You can now exit VisualEditor by pressing the " " key; as with other methods to exit, if you have outstanding changes you are asked whether you want to save first (T52868).

We fixed and quickly released a regression that meant that using the citation menu options inside a referenced didn't work (T76082), and one which meant the "switch to source editor" tool was disabled (T75965) and didn't pull your changes (T76114). We also fixed an issue that meant that all inspector tools – like the link, language, and formula editors – would close immediately after they were opened (T76076), and one where the media dialog wouldn't ever enable the "Apply changes" button when you changed a caption (T76074).

Our work to support languages which use Input Method Editors took another step forward, and in so doing we believe we fixed two long-standing bugs with multi-symbol characters in Malayalam (T53511 and T56057). With help from the Language Engineering team, we improved a couple of the interface messages to be easier for translators and more consistent for users (T75969 and T75971).

The OOjs UI library had two new versions, 0.2.3 and 0.2.4, released, which VisualEditor and MediaWiki both now use. These releases fixed a number of issues with the size and layout of buttons in dialogs when you first opened one (T72061) and when they resized (T75783), a follow-up that avoids windows animating from zero height when they resize (T76371), and finally changing the default target for buttons' links to not open in a new window (T75452).

You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.25/wmf11 changelog, and all tasks closed in this period are on Phabricator's list.

2014-12-10 (MW 1.25wmf12)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.25wmf12 branch deployment on Wednesday 10 December. In the week since the last deployment, the team added a new minor feature, worked on the infrastructure supporting future improvements, and provided a range of bug fixes.

You can now use find and replace in VisualEditor, reachable through the tool menu or by pressing Ctrl or Cmd on Macs (T50368). You can search or replace content forwards or backwards, including in references and image captions, with options to be case sensitive or insensitive and even use a regular expression if desired, or replace all matches in one go.

We found a couple of bad issues which we fixed and released early to avoid disruption for users. The first was causing internal information from VisualEditor to be pasted into pages when you edited them (T76749), and the other was a mistake with the configuration for mobile that meant VisualEditor wouldn't open there (T76660).

Our on-going work to improve language input continued, with an issue related to Chinese input now fixed (T78121) amongst others. If you select some text with a space at the end, when you make it bold or italics we now don't apply that to the trailing space, which should result in cleaner wikitext (T53023). The reference dialog now disables the "Apply changes" button until a change is present (T76928).

A bug we fixed was causing links in templates to point to the wrong place when editing them from a non-standard link (T76379). VisualEditor now tries to use localStorage instead of a cookie to hide the welcome dialog from anonymous users who have already seen it, which reduces network load for users (T64884); logged-in users are already using a system preference instead of a cookie, so this will not affect them.

We removed an inefficient API call that meant saving the page would generate an extra parse of the page, needlessly slowing things down. We made an efficiency improvement to the code that runs when content changes to reduce the impact if sequences are entered. The browser detection software inside VisualEditor that works around browser bugs now recognises the soon-to-be-released Internet Explorer 12, targeted through the new  class. VisualEditor was updated to use UnicodeJS to v0.1.2, which updates our specification support to Unicode 7.0. The old  function has been removed as part of our work to properly support multiple parallel surfaces in VisualEditor.

The OOjs UI library had two new versions, 0.3.0 and 0.4.0, released, which VisualEditor and MediaWiki both now use. These releases include a fix to the  function so that it doesn't only remove open windows (T76659), adding   to operate like   to   (T76639), and making  's auto-resize method more efficient (T75328). They also included a few small breaking changes to the API as part of our work to clean up and document the system for other developers, removing the deprecated  and   events (T76861) and making a number of   getters static (T76631).

You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.25/wmf12 changelog, and all tasks closed in this period are on Phabricator's list.

2014-12-17 (MW 1.25wmf13)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.25wmf13 branch deployment on Wednesday 17 December. In the week since the last deployment, the team switched MediaWiki over to a new design for OOjs UI which affects VisualEditor, made some improvements to other tools, and fixed a range of bugs.

There is now a new design for VisualEditor, as led by the Design team and implemented by the team's members of the Front-End Standards group (T78054 via T76662 and many others). The find-and-replace controls introduced last week now have a "done" button to close it more obviously than pressing Esc or clicking the menu control again (T77933). You can now use Ctrl or equivalent to trigger a save, rather than just to open the save dialog (T76161).

The special character inserter now doesn't automatically capitalise the headings of each section, as that isn't appropriate in all languages (T78327). The media and reference dialogs now don't hard-code left-to-right as their directionality, but inherit it from the main document, which should improve the editor for RTL users (T71969). We fixed a bug that meant pressing Esc in a dialog would also think you had pressed it in the editor and so try to close (T78201).

The "Edit Source" tab now doesn't hijack middle-click or other modifiers (T78546). We adjusted the media insertion dialog screen to layout items more cleanly in the centre of the window (T78050). We made further improvements to the handling of input as part of our work to support IMEs, removing some special handling around up- and down-cursoring. We also fixed a few merge glitches ahead of the deployment (T78180, T78335, and T78338).

The OOjs UI library had two new versions, 0.5.0 and 0.6.0, released, which VisualEditor and MediaWiki both now use. These releases were mainly done to include a large number of last-minute changes to the design, made as part of the preparations for the switch-over (T78029, T78030, T78031, T78032, T78033, T78034, T78035, T78036, T78040, T78042, T78043, T78047, T78048, T78052, T78082, T78085, T78169, T78173, T78177, T78178, T78199, and T78321). We also improved  to have a much better DOM structure (T78499, which fixed T78447 for RTL languages, and T74592 & T74640 for Internet Explorer users), fixed a bug in   (T78270), expanded   to support string values for static HTML use (T76645) and made the code to scroll elements into view be useful in more situations (T73609).

You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.25/wmf13 changelog, and all tasks closed in this period are on Phabricator's list.

2015-01-07 (MW 1.25wmf14)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.25wmf14 branch deployment on Wednesday 7 January. In the three weeks since the last deployment, the team made some performance improvements, design tweaks, and fixed a number of bugs.

Due to some breaking changes in MobileFrontend and VisualEditor that weren't resolved, VisualEditor was not working on the mobile site in various ways; we released a number of fixes early to remedy this and so avoid disruption to users (T78710, T84897, T85480, T85481, and T85897).

We fixed a bug that meant pasting in some circumstances could lead to a "☀" character being pasted in as well (T76916). The save dialog now gets the focus again when you open in, which ability it lost a few weeks ago due to an oversight (T75675); we also improved its styling a little in the new theme. VisualEditor was still referring to Bugzilla rather than Phabricator in a few areas, which are now corrected (T75733). An issue which meant that changing the attributes of an extension block like a SyntaxHighlight block wouldn't save was fixed (T85818). Search and replace in long documents is now hugely faster, as we won't try to highlight every occurrence if there are more than 100 on-screen at once (T78234).

We fixed an issue that meant the "edit source" link wouldn't work once you'd edited a page with VisualEditor until you reloaded the page (T85552). The layout of the citation menu was tweaked for the mobile site after a breaking change there (T85025). Thanks to long-running work by the Parsoid team (T50900), any attempted transclusions of images that have been deleted or don't exist yet now display, though are still uneditable (T54186).

The TemplateData editor has been completely re-written to use a different design (T67815) based on the same OOjs UI system as VisualEditor (T73746), which fixed a couple of existing issues (T73077 and T73078) as well as improving usability. TemplateData also was fixed to avoid double-loading a piece of the data infrastructure shared with VisualEditor (T85733). Thanks to a volunteer, WikiEditor now localises the " " attribute in the help section of the toolbar about how to insert a media file (T40831).

VisualEditor now uses a core service inside MediaWiki to talk to Parsoid, rather than internal methods, which allows other projects like Flow to share this code (T1218). We tweaked the LinkCache code to already know about the page the user is editing (T78642). We added to the IME testing framework a new test for typing the character "ą", as used in Polish and which broke last month. The OOjs UI library had a new version, 0.6.1, released, which VisualEditor and MediaWiki both now use. This release included a design tweak to shrink the text size of section labels as they were inappropriately large (T78037), and a bug fix to make sub-windows not have too much padding inside a  (T78548).

You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.25/wmf14 changelog, and all tasks closed in this period are on Phabricator's list.

2015-01-14 (MW 1.25wmf15)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.25wmf15 branch deployment on Wednesday 14 January. In the week since the last deployment, the team made some minor feature improvements, design tweaks, and fixed a number of bugs.

The "Save page" button in the toolbar (to open the save dialog) is now "progressive" (blue) rather than "constructive" (green), per the style guide, as it doesn't immediately save; the final save button inside the save dialog itself remains constructive (T86507). Per community request, editors on Russian Wikipedia can now use VisualEditor in the "Article Incubator" / drafts namespace (T86688). If you would like VisualEditor enabled on a namespace on your wiki, simply get community agreement and then file a ticket in Phabricator.

We fixed a bug that meant adding a template wouldn't work, and release it early so that it didn't affect users (T86056).

There were two bugs related to merging cells in tables which would fail to delete empty columns or rows from the model, which led to issues; we fixed these by making empty rows and columns (T75223 and T86160). The "apply changes" button in the media and reference dialogs now pick up on changes like adding a link to the first word as changes, rather than needing (T85845). The design of the category editor was changed to drop the rounded corners that no longer fit as well with the new theme (T78039). We split out the "Done" label for the search and replace tool so that different languages can translate it in different ways (T85852), and improved the documentation of the existing one (T72281).

The OOjs UI library had a new version, 0.6.2, released, which VisualEditor and MediaWiki both now use. This release included some feature improvements, a series of design tweaks to make the down-arrow for menus slightly smaller, lighter and centred appropriately (T86001) and to the display of buttons, and a fix to the window manager to make sure that windows are cleared when the manager is destroyed.

You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.25/wmf15 changelog, and all tasks closed in this period are on Phabricator's list.

2015-02-04 (MW 1.25wmf16)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.25wmf16 branch deployment on Wednesday 4 February. In the three weeks since the last deployment, the team mostly worked on performance, a few feature improvements, and provided fixes to a number of bugs. We also attended various events and meetings, including the MediaWiki Developer Summit 2015 and the Quarterly Review for the Editing team covering October–December 2014.

Searching for media is now much easier, due to a big change we've made to how the media display works. We're now using larger images shown in a "masonry fit" manner, with a click-through panel which shows the preview larger still along with data about the image, from the same source as the MediaViewer built by the Multimedia team (T78161 and thus T74061). The "review your changes" panel of the save dialog, where you can see the wikitext diff of the change you're about to save, is now a bit wider to make it easier to see what is going on (T78823).

If you watch a page whilst you're editing it, VisualEditor will now keep track of this to make sure the box is check correctly when you open the save dialog (T78694). We also added to the media editor dialog the name of the file so it can be easily found and copied elsewhere (T54459), and contextual help snippets to explain for example what the "alt text" field is for and why users should fill it in (T75731). The keyboard shortcuts for the search-and-replace system now include a "find next" and "find previous" command, which have been added to the keyboard shortcuts dialog (T87113, T87872). If you enter an invalid value for a link in the box, the "Open" button is now disabled rather than left at its previous value (T86709).

In performance terms, we focussed on making the opening of the editor faster as that is the area that users have told us needs most work. We found a number of areas where the way VisualEditor set up the initial appearance of the toolbar was slow, which we addressed (T87417 and T87160). We switched to be more efficient the way that we get information about the links on the page (T88259), and about the media displayed there too (T75822). We have made the way that the edit surface is constructed faster, batching together the insertions rather than doing them individually (T87418).

We worked around a bad performance bug in Sizzle which meant switching between documents was very inefficient, which we previously did several times when showing a page with image captions (T87416). We improved the efficiency of the OOjs UI library's " ", avoiding making the browser recalculate the styling of the content, which is slow (T87420). We found an issue where on building the initial view of slugs, VisualEditor was adjusting their visibility too late, making the operation expensive, which we have now fixed (T88387). VisualEditor now will get your browser to resize larger images to smaller ones, re-using rather than fetching a new version from the server (T88248), and searched-for media are now cached as well rather than re-fetching the item when you insert it (T88187).

We fixed and released early a bug which meant that the rare  option was always applied when you set a redirect, whether or not you enabled it (T86827). We also fixed and released early an issue with MediaWiki's display of JSON pages which prevented their use and made it impossible to edit them (T86270 and later T86748). We solved an issue that caused the "Page created" confirmation message to appear at the wrong point, after you had clicked edit a second time (T58921). Edit notices are now only shown once the user closes the welcome dialog, avoiding a bug that meant they were hidden when it closed (T86987).

If you have MathJax mode enabled in the Math extension, formulæ were previously showing their highlights incorrectly in Chrome, Safari and Opera (but correct in Firefox); this is now fixed (T87007). The template dialog now retains focus when it's opened, which was previously being lost (T85484). The "permalink" and "PDF download" links in the sidebar are now updated on save to point to the new version of the page (T74461).

We fixed an issue which meant that text you had written into a fake blank line (a "slug") would be deleted if you clicked directly into a different slug (T85948). We improved the display of the search-and-replace window that slides down from the toolbar to remove an unnecessary border (T87125). We found and fixed an oversight in the recently re-done TemplateData GUI, where you could delete a field but not then re-add it in that edit (T86916), another one where multiple edits to the same template would repeat the "order" information about how to sequence the fields each time (T88126), and finally one which added whitespace to aliases when you edited (T85330).

A bug in VisualEditor meant that some dialogs were interacting with the sizes of other dialogs, so they never got to the right height when going full-screen (T76863). FlaggedRevisions now correctly puts the notice about there being transcluded files or templates with outstanding changes into the edit notices pile for VisualEditor users (T54280).

The OOjs UI library had a four new versions – 0.6.3 0.6.4  0.6.5 and 0.6.6 – released, the latest of which VisualEditor and MediaWiki both now use. These releases included some fixes to behaviour and display regressions which we caught before wider release (T85226, T85973, T87126, T87127, T87787, T88212, T88232, T88471, and T88503). We improved the behaviour of s to handle user scripts and gadgets interferring with their state (T86868). The display of shadows on buttons, the toolbar and drop-down menus in the MediaWiki theme was improved (T78083), as was the relative sizing of radio and checkbox controls (T86003). We added a new dialog size above "large" called "larger" (T86396), and buttons and various other widgets now have default margins for simpler display (T76643).

We added two new layouts –, which associates a button with some other widget, such as a checkbox and "save" combination (T76634), and  , which gives a menu on one side of the layout. We introduced a new  which replaces the now-deprecated   which we will remove in a few releases (T86851). Thanks to some excellent work by TheDJ, a volunteer specialising in accessibility issues, we now have a large number of improvements to the library in this area (T87690, T87694, T87697, T87830, and T88085).

We upstreamed a text input that can have a label inside the input area from VisualEditor (where it is used in the search-and-replace tool) to OOjs UI –    (T87239). There is now some limited server-side support for  (T86393). Input direction is now set using an HTML property, rather than a CSS rule, to prevent inappropriate inheritance where it's not desired (T87637). Users of the server-side PHP implementation of OOjs UI now have the theme and directionality set for them automatically in MediaWiki core (T85767).

The OOjs library also had a new version, 1.1.4, released, which VisualEditor and MediaWiki both now use. This release included some minor performance optimisations (T74933).

You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.25/wmf16 changelog, and all tasks closed in this period are on Phabricator's list.

2015-02-11 (MW 1.25wmf17)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.25wmf17 branch deployment on Wednesday 10 February. In the week since the last deployment, the team made some performance improvements, a few feature improvements, and provided fixes to a number of bugs.

​You can now drag and drop categories to re-arrange their order of appearance ​on the page (T52809). ​The citation and template tools will now only enable "Apply Changes" button once a change is made. Previously it used to remain enabled and clicking on that used to enable "Save Page" button even though there was no changes made (T57976).

As part of our work to make VisualEditor better support languages, we now rely on the browser to move the cursor, rather than interfering. This will be invisible for most users, but cursoring will now be 'visible' rather than 'logical' in right-to-left documents, and in some edge cases (like switching between right-to-left and left-to-right blocks), the behaviour will now be the same as other websites, e.g. when you use Google Mail or Facebook.​

We fixed and quickly released a regression that meant media search was running infinitely when there are only few search results returned for some search keywords(T88764). We also fixed and released early a regression bug where user was not being able to open category widget (T88736).

We made a performance tweak where we will be using CSS instead of JS for DOM hiding and​ ​muting. This resolved the issue where the animation on the opacity of a first heading of a page was taking​ nearly 0.2s, slowing the load of the editor (T88590, T87160). We resolved a bad bug which was causin​g ​things you wrote to be​ invisible to VisualEditor and not save when you did some kinds of selections ​things you wrote to be​ invisible to VisualEditor and not save when you did some kinds of selections in Firefox (T88612).

You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.25/wmf17 changelog, and all tasks closed in this period are on Phabricator's list.

2015-02-19 (MW 1.25wmf18)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.25wmf18 branch deployment on Wednesday 19 February. In the week since the last deployment, the team mostly worked on some performance improvements, design tweaks and a number of bug fixes.

In our work to make VisualEditor better support languages, we have re-written a large number of areas of the editor. As what we believe will be the final piece of our systemic preparations to release control of events to the browser, we now rely on the browser to respond to delete and backspace commands, rather than interfering. Much like last week's work on native cursor movement, this should be invisible for most users but will have positive impacts for users of Input Method Editors ("IMEs").

As part of our on-going work on improving VisualEditor performance, we did some re-factoring of our code to remove some expensive legacy corruption checks which are no longer justified (T87161) and improve a fix for a visual juddering bug in Chrome to make it less over-cautious and so not slow down the editor too much (T89082).

We fixed a bad bug which was causing inline template to be replaced by HTML when user was doing cut-and-paste of a paragraph (T86401). We also fixed a bug which meant the transition of highlight of an image or template was not smooth when you tried to open them (T88867). There was a bug about not displaying an image's uploader and artist correctly in the media dialog (T88835), which we also fixed in this release.

The OOjs UI library had a new version, 0.7.0, released (changelog, task list), the which VisualEditor and MediaWiki both now use. This release included a breaking change to remove iframe "isolated" dialog support, which had been very problematic and complicating, and was now unused by VisualEditor after a great deal of effort to work around browser bugs. Beyond this change, we tweaked the styling of disabled buttons so they are more easily distinguished from inactive buttons (T88483), made a fix for the auto-height adjustment for multi-line text boxes (T89015), and added some further accessibility changes (T87705, T87707, T88079, T88080, T88082, and T88977). We have added support in  for non-  items (T88053), cleaned up some code for display measurement in   (T89073). There were also a large number of documentation improvements made this release, mirroring the on-wiki documentation improvements.

You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.25/wmf18 changelog, and all tasks closed in this period are on Phabricator's list.