VisualEditor/changelog/Archive/MediaWiki 1.26

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

2015-04-08 (MW 1.26wmf1)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.26wmf1 branch deployment on Wednesday 8 April. In the week since the last deployment, the team mostly worked on ​providing lot of bug fixes and few feature and design tweaks.

The auto-fill citation tool now sets the citation type as 'journal' rather than 'web' when you give it a DOI, PMID, or PMCID (T94597). Pasting text with  and   tags will be automatically converted to   and   tags respectively (T70928). There is now a RTL variant for the help icon in VisualEditor which is for all RTL languages, except Hebrew and Yiddish  where the LTR version is shown (T76540).

We fixed and released early a bad bug which meant if user clicked at the end of a selected text and hit enter to go to the next line it would delete the text which was selected before (T94931).

We fixed a bad regression bug where users were not being able to place the cursor inside the input fields for reference dialogs as it was forcing the cursor to be placed on the CE instead (T95069). We also fixed a bug which meant that the edits made in a document would go out of sync and appear differently in the diff view and in the read mode due to some erroneous selection (T94696). There was a bug where when the adjacent links had same target they were not getting merged as a single link but creating two separate links (T95028).

The OOjs UI library had a new version, , released (changelog, task list), which VisualEditor and MediaWiki both now use. There was a UI issue where the gap between the button label and icon inside media settings dialog was missing making them look overlapped, which we fixed in this release (T93002). We fixed an issue where hovering over a button in a dialog using Chrome would make the button position shift upwards (T93472). There was a bug which meant if you open a dialog towards the end of a page the page would scroll up a bit, this is now fixed (T89612).

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 1.26/wmf1 changelog, and all tasks closed in this period are on Phabricator's list.

2015-04-15 (MW 1.26wmf2)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.26wmf2 branch deployment on Wednesday 15 April. In the week since the last deployment, the team mostly worked on ​providing lot of bug fixes and feature changes and few design tweaks.

You can now use the auto-fill citation tool when editing a reference (T94621).From now on, whenever a user opens an inspector or a dialog the cursor will be automatically placed inside the first field and it will be highlighted (T95450). We also did the same change for the search textbox inside Re-use citation dialog (T91479).For TemplateData, we added a new optional and translatable property "Example" for template parameters which will show up when there is a text describing the usage of that parameter (T53049).

We fixed and released early a bad bug which was showing an error while saving the edit an article that the revision ID is not found as it was trying to parse an out of date revid, we fixed this issue by explicitly passing the oldid (T94367). We also fixed and released early a bug where empty Edit notices were appearing when the notice contained a FlaggedRev (T95989).

We fixed a bad regression bug which meant citations wont get added to the article while keeping the autofill citation dialog open in the background because we were not closing that inspector (T93638). We also fixed a bug which was showing the context menu for link along with media while selecting an image which has a caption as link (T95246). While creating a citation using ISBN/DOI/PMID etc with autofill citation option, they were appearing as redlink in the context menu, this is now fixed (T95247). There was an issue with cursoring for nested tables which was preventing user to cursor left/right, we fixed that issue (T95574).

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 1.26/wmf2 changelog, and all tasks closed in this period are on Phabricator's list.

2015-04-22 (MW 1.26wmf3)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.26wmf3 branch deployment on Wednesday 22 April. In the week since the last deployment, the team focused mainly on ​a large number of bug fixes.

When searching for a template, the dropdown menu of results now contains template descriptions. (T53436).

We fixed a significant regression which occasionally made the progress bar move backwards (T93964). We quickly resolved an issue which caused the language tool to disappear (T96447) and a bug in the citation dialog which prevented the parameters from appearing (T96443). We fixed a bad bug which caused newly created links on subpages to have the wrong targets (T96643). We fixed a regression which was causing an error while using the find and replace tool (T96088). We fixed a bug which prevented users from moving their cursors into captions (T96356). We fixed a bug which caused blank line placeholders (slugs) to appear in the basic reference dialog (T93042). We have removed a delay in opening the special character panel, we fixed that (T96456).

We also fixed a number of browser-specific bugs, including one which prevented Firefox users from placing their cursors inside particular table cells (T96446) and another which prevented Opera 12 users from opening VisualEditor (T96435).

We also fixed some issues with the mobile web version of VisualEditor. In iOS Safari, there was a bug which was kept all dialogs from opening fully during first attempt of every edit session (T86233). The editing toolbar was not properly disabled when the page was not focused, which made it possible to click the buttons without any effect. This is now fixed (T96305). We fixed a bad issue that allowed users to get stuck inside the link dialog after searching for something which produced no result (T68696).

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 1.26/wmf3 changelog, and all tasks closed in this period are on Phabricator's list.

2015-04-29 (MW 1.26wmf4)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.26wmf4 branch deployment on Wednesday, 29 April. In the week since the last deployment, the team focused mainly on ​implementing new interface for a major feature and providing a number of bug fixes.

There is now a new search interface for the link dialogue (T76397). The link inspector now has two separate sections: one for articles and one for external links. It also shows more information about each article search result such as a thumbnail image  Wikidata description, and appropriate icon for disambiguation pages, redirect pages and empty pages. We also replaced the previous order of link suggestions and reduced the number of results to five, with creating a new page being the last option (T93698). The context menu for link inspector also now includes the page image and description (T93695).

For the auto-fill citation option, the cite button is now labeled with the word "cite" rather than a book icon. (T95470). There  is now a tooltip  describing each character in the special character inserter (T70425). The parameter list inside the template dialog will now remain open after inserting a parameter from the list, so that users don’t need to click on "add more information" each time they want to add another parameter (T95696).

We quickly fixed and released the bug fix early  for an issue where VisualEditor was failing to load when there was a revision id mismatch earlier on that page (T97069).

We fixed a significant bug which meant some characters were not getting converted to UTF-8 correctly (T95833). We fixed a regression which changed the positions of the toggle buttons in the "find and replace" dialog incorrectly (T97262). We fixed a regression which was causing an error while using the find and replace tool (T96088). We fixed a bug which meant that when a slug (fake blank line)  was the last item in a page, selecting all content would create inconsistency in the selection range (T96357). Previously, clicking on the disabled "Open" button inside the link inspector would open the same page in a separate tab, this is now fixed by making it unclickable when disabled (T93004).

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 1.26/wmf4 changelog, and all tasks closed in this period are on Phabricator's list.

2015-05-06 (MW 1.26wmf5)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.26wmf5 branch deployment on Wednesday, 6 May. In the week since the last deployment, the team focused mainly providing a number of bug fixes and some minor design tweaks.

There is now consistent error styling for all text boxes throughout VisualEditor (T97516). In the link inspector, if you insert a URL to another page in the same wiki it will be converted as internal page when users switch to the "Search Pages" section (T94334). Also, the matching parts of link suggestions will now be highlighted inside link inspector (T93697).

We fixed a significant bug which meant the position of context menus was getting misplaced (T98236, T98191). We also fixed a bug where the font of the page was getting bigger after switching to Read mode from Edit mode (T98193). There was an issue where the article font was appearing much smaller while loading VisualEditor; this is now fixed (T97690). The autofill citation dialog now has a more meaningful label 'Generate' instead of "Lookup" for the submit button (T97353). There was a bug in Internet Explorer which meant pressing backspace or delete or creating a heading would cause the page to abruptly scroll; we fixed that (T73119).

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 1.26/wmf5 changelog, and all tasks closed in this period are on Phabricator's list.

2015-05-14 (MW 1.26wmf6)
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.26wmf6 branch deployment on Wednesday, 13 May. In the week since the last deployment, the team focused mainly on improving the interface of a major feature, as well as providing a number of bug fixes and few design tweaks.

You now make citations through a single tool for the entire citation workflow by introducing three tabs inside it: Automatic, Manual and Re-use (T97390). The toolbar in VisualEditor has a new design now which is consistent with the MediaWiki theme (T86693, T85998, T98423). The progress bar from now on will accelerate towards the end as it nears the completion of loading a page, and generally feel more accurate (T95137).

We quickly made and released early a fix for a significant bug which meant users were unable to open VisualEditor after switching to Read mode from Edit mode (T98388). We also fixed and release the fix early where the articles were getting unchecked from your watchlist after editing and then saving it (T97838).

We fixed a bug which meant to "Switch to source editing" tool was never activate-able in the Page Settings menu (T97646). There was an issue which meant when users edit an existing reference and then applies it, the context menu for it was getting cut-off which is now fixed (T98430). We also fixed a bug where after adding a citation, the URL format was appearing incorrectly on the context menu (T95700). There was a regression bug on the sizes of checkboxes and radio buttons appearing smaller which got fixed (T93944). We fixed the issue of a dark highlight appearing over the first match in the link inspector (T98085). We quickly fixed an UI issue with the toolbar in VisualEditor  being misaligned by one pixel (T98795). We removed the tooltip for the tool-tips of the formatting menu in the toolbar as they were pointless and confusing (T98417).

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 1.26/wmf6 changelog, and all tasks closed in this period are on Phabricator's list.

2015-05-20 (MW 1.26wmf7)
Changes to VisualEditor were light this week as much of the team vacationed ahead of our action-packed hackathon this weekend.

We made some long-needed improvements to the display of links to non-existent images (T52788). Toolbar items can now contain both an icon and a text label, rather than just one or the other. This is now being used for the cite button (T97879). We also fixed several regressions in the toolbar styling (T97905, T98651, T98760, T98776).

You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on our integration server. You can find a list of the tasks resolved in this deployment in its Phabricator tag and a complete list of the individual code commits in the release notes for MediaWiki 1.26wmf7.