VisualEditor/changelog/Archive/MediaWiki 1.23

 2013-10-24 (MW 1.23wmf1)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.23wmf1 branch deployment on Thursday 24 October, the first deployment of alphas of MediaWiki 1.23. In the week since 1.22wmf22, the team worked on three major infrastructure changes, some monitoring code, and fixing bugs.

The first infrastructure change has cleaned up the core framework that VisualEditor has created for itself, oojs, making this more efficient, more complete, and more re-usable for other projects; this is complete for now. The second change was to spin out the UX framework from VisualEditor into oojs-ui, which will let other teams at Wikimedia (like Flow) and gadget authors re-use VisualEditor UX components without needing to pull in the entirety of VisualEditor; this is mostly complete, with some minor changes needed before it will be deployed. The third change is to change how inserting characters works to use the browser's native operations more frequently when applicable, and should reduce the difficulties that VisualEditor has with some input methods and languages, and which can cause pawn characters ("♙") to be wrongly inserted; this is currently in testing, and also nearly ready for deployment.

Outside of these areas of work, some minor fixes were included. The category suggestions drop-down was appearing in the wrong place rather than below its input box, which is now fixed. VisualEditor now supports Parsoid's changed representation of numbered external links (bug 53505). There was a bug in the save dialog that caused it to crash if there was an error in loading the page from Parsoid, which is now fixed. The media item resize label now is centred whilst resizing regardless of which tool you use to resize it. A typo that stopped the toolbar from floating on MediaWiki.org was fixed before it went out to other wikis. A bug that meant that the display and the data model could get out of sync in some cases when using the Language annotation was fixed (bugs 54335 and 54675).

The browser tests were expanded to cover some basic cursor operations, which uncovered an issue in our testing framework that doesn't work with cursoring in Firefox; the Chrome tests continue to fail due to a bug with the welcome beta message for that part of the testing framework.

Finally, VisualEditor was enabled on the File:, Help: and Category: namespaces on all wikis (bug 55968), the Portal: and Viquiprojecte: namespaces on Catalan Wikipedia (bug 56000), and the Portal: and Book: namespaces on English Wikipedia (bug 56001).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.23/wmf1 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2013-10-31 (MW 1.23wmf2)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.23wmf2 branch deployment on Thursday 31 October. In the week since 1.23wmf1, the team worked on some major infrastructure changes, some minor toolbar improvements, and fixing bugs.

A new feature lets you do a one-way switch from VisualEditor to the wikitext editor which will preserve your changes without you needing to save (bug 50687). It is available in a new menu in the action buttons at the right (left in RTL contexts) of the document toolbar, which has been simplified. The "Page Settings" button has been replaced with said menu, where it appears with it's the two available sections of that dialog (Categories and Languages) now directly available in that menu. You cannot yet switch back from the wikitext editor into VisualEditor, though we hope to be able to build that in time. VisualEditor's integration with the forthcoming Beta Features programme was finalised: the ability for users on all wikis with VisualEditor to opt-in to having the new formula editor available, for testing ahead of making it available for all users.

In terms of bugs, VisualEditor now keeps track of the context in which you loaded the page, which lets us fix up links in document to point to the correct place regardless of what entry point you launched the editor from - so the content of pages loaded through /wiki/Foobar?veaction=edit and /w/index.php?title=Foobar&veaction=edit both now have text links that work if triggered (bug 48915). We also fixed an issue that meant that completely-empty templates became impossible to interact with inside VisualEditor, as they didn't show up (bug 55810).

In infrastructure, a set of changes on how the document model and the editing surface keep synchronised to ensure that events always propagate one way have now been completed, making VisualEditor much more extensible and allowing the possibility of collaborative editing; along with other things, this led to a change in how the undo and redo actions are done (bug 53224). The spinning out of the UX framework from VisualEditor into oojs-ui, which lets other teams at Wikimedia (like Flow) and gadget authors re-use VisualEditor UX components without needing to pull in the entirety of VisualEditor, is now complete, and will soon be moved to a shared code repository. Work on improving how inserting characters works, switching to use the browser's native operations more frequently when applicable, continues. This should improve VisualEditor's support for some input methods and languages, avoiding the wrongful insertion of pawn characters ("♙") when tested further.

You can monitor the automated browser tests' results (triggered every twelve hours) live on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.23/wmf2 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2013-11-07 (MW 1.23wmf3)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.23wmf3 branch deployment on Thursday 7 November. In the week since 1.23wmf2, the team worked on a major infrastructure change and fixing bugs.

The supporting code needed for the forthcoming rich pasting was extended further to ensure that no corruptions occur, with greater testing added. Work continued to support the forthcoming reference dialog to quickly add citations based on local templates. Any links in the save dialog now open in a new window, rather than inside the iframe of the dialog. An incompatibility between VisualEditor and the deployed Parsoid service that prevented editing categories and language links was fixed. VisualEditor now supports editing of private wikis, by forwarding the Cookie: HTTP header to Parsoid (bug 44483). VisualEditor now uses content language when fetching TemplateData information, so reducing bandwidth use, and users on multi-language or multi-script wikis now get TemplateData hinting for templates as they would expect (bug 50888).

In infrastructure, the splitting out of the UX framework from VisualEditor into oojs-ui, which lets other teams at Wikimedia (like Flow) and gadget authors re-use VisualEditor UX components without needing to pull in the entirety of VisualEditor, was tweaked and extended. It is now being moved to a shared code repository.

You can monitor the automated browser tests' results (triggered every twelve hours) live on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.23/wmf3 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2013-11-14 (MW 1.23wmf4)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.23wmf4 branch deployment on Thursday 14 November. In the week since 1.23wmf3, the team worked on some minor feature changes, more of the code's infrastructure, and fixing bugs.

The wikitext warning, which appears if you attempt some forms of wikitext like '', ''' or {{foo}} now also warns you on writing <ref> (bug 56755). The switch-to-wikitext feature, introduced last week, now works in Firefox as well as Chrome, Safari and Opera (bug 56767). Some bugs in the editing surface were fixed, including one that added an extra new-line at the start of the page (bug 56274), and editing of blank dialogs' sections having the first character end up mis-placed and be impossible to delete (bugs 56642 and 57211). A bug that meant that very rapidly undoing the insertion of a media item before it had fully saved would throw an error was fixed (bug 56649). Shortcut commands have been added for underline (Ctrl+U or ⌘ Cmd+U), subscript (Ctrl+, or ⌘ Cmd+,) and superscipt (Ctrl+. or ⌘ Cmd+.).

For RTL environments like Hebrew or Arabic, the the direction of the <textarea> in extension tags' inspectors will now correspond to the surrounding content direction (bug 56779), except in the <syntaxhighlight> extension, where it must always be LTR (bug 56780). The icons for VisualEditor elements in Beta Features were modified for use in RTL environments. A bug that meant VisualEditor didn't restore the selection after the window was blurred and then re-focussed, which broke section editing on wikis with ULS (which does this) was fixed (bug 56651). VisualEditor now pays attention to the page language, rather than the wiki's global language, for future support. After the mw.util.wikiGetlink function was deprecated last week, we have switched to use mw.util.getUrl instead (bug 57237).

Final touches were made to the oojs-ui library, refactoring how windows work to make the code simpler and more reusable; allowing it to stand alone with a generic localisation utility, adding a widget for a toggle switch, and proper disabling of items in the toolbar; a regression that meant that inspector tools (like the link or language inspectors) no longer showed as active in the toolbar if the cursor was in a link was also fixed.

The automated browser tests were expanded to cover an initial set of UTF-8, to remove hard-coding of editing strings for future flexibility, and some hooks were updated to keep track of changes in VisualEditor. Some additional events were added to the EventLogging integration to allow for in-depth analysis of the areas which need to be optimised to improve the performance of saving and loading pages in VisualEditor.

You can monitor the automated browser tests' results (triggered every twelve hours) live on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.23/wmf4 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period are on [mediazilla:buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&bug_status=VERIFIED&bug_status=CLOSED&product=VisualEditor&query_format=advanced&target_milestone=VE-deploy-2013-11-14&order=component&list_id=252243 Bugzilla's list].

2013-11-21 (MW 1.23wmf5)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.23wmf5 branch deployment on Thursday 21 November. In the week since 1.23wmf4, the team worked on some minor bug fixes and code infrastructure, and travelled to Pune, India for the Open Source Language Summit.

VisualEditor will no longer let you set a link over a reference invocation, as that isn't allowed in MediaWiki (bug 56250). It's now possible to remove a blank line at the start of an article (bug 54964).

An issue with pasting references, where the new reference was auto-numbered the same as an existing (but different) reference, was fixed. Changes to meta-elements (like the categories or the page's default sort key) that are null operations (such as adding and then removing a category) no longer create a transaction (and so do not enable the "Save page" button). The beta welcome dialog text now correctly points to the re-named "Help" button, instead of still calling it "Beta".

VisualEditor switched to use builds of the oojs-ui library instead of a local copy of the tree; the library had an inputFilter function added to the existing InputWidget, and improvements to the sanitisation of changes. The code documentation was updated in preparation for the switch to JSDuck 5. The automated browser tests now test additional types of text markup: computer code (<code>), strikethrough (<s>), subscript (<sub>), superscript (<sup>) and underline (<u>).

You can monitor the automated browser tests' results (triggered every twelve hours) live on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.23/wmf5 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period are on [mediazilla:buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&bug_status=VERIFIED&bug_status=CLOSED&product=VisualEditor&query_format=advanced&target_milestone=VE-deploy-2013-11-21&order=component&list_id=252243 Bugzilla's list].

2013-12-05 (MW 1.23wmf6)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.23wmf6 branch deployment on Thursday 5 December. In the two weeks since 1.23wmf5, the team worked on some new features, performance and usability improvements, minor bug fixes and code infrastructure.

You can now paste rich content copied from external sources (not just as plain text), including other VisualEditor surfaces (bugs 41193, 48170, 50128, and 53828). You can paste the clipboard as plain (unformatted) text by using a new keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+⇧ Shift+V or ⌘ Cmd+⇧ Shift+V (bug 53781). It is now possible to edit auto-numbered external links (i.e. one that appears like "[3]"); you can change the target using the link inspector as with other links. If you change it to an internal link, it will replace the auto-numbered anchor with the name of the target (bug 53505). You can now launch into VisualEditor by appending ?veaction=edit to the view page URL irrespective of user preferences – this will let users test VisualEditor with a variety of browsers without needing to log in each time (bug 55900).

We now optimistically submit the page Parsoid for serialisation into wikitext as soon as the user launches the save dialog, before they've clicked "save page", which should make saving the page appear faster for many use cases (bug 56011). If you have loaded the wikitext diff of a page ("Review your changes") and then try to save it without making changes, VisualEditor will keep a copy of the wikitext from the first time, so saving will be much faster (bug 55979).

We significantly changed how VisualEditor stores the contents of the page internally (from UTF-8 back to UTF-16), which fixes a large number of issues related to inserting, deleting, cursoring around and selecting over non-Latin scripts like Devanagari, Arabic or Thai (bugs 51472, 51596, 51846, 53757). We now annotate the body tag of the HTML document with a class ("ve-activated") so gadget authors can ensure they don't fire in VisualEditor mode (bug 57555).

A bug which meant that switching to wikitext when logged out always gave an edit conflict warning has been fixed (bug 56835). Auto-numbered external links now also auto-number when they appear in generated content like reference lists (bug 57420). Cursoring over a generated content node (a media file, template, reference or similar) now does not get you stuck in an infinite cursoring loop in Firefox (bug 57600). Clicking in the blank space above the link inspector now closes the inspector, so you won't get a pawn ("♙") appearing if you try to insert content there (bug 56976). A bug that effected the rendering of <source> blocks in the MWExtensionNode, causing it to appear empty after the user edits it is now fixed (bug 54577). A regression that meant that the "watch this" checkbox in the save dialog was checked regardless of the user preference was reversed (bug 56206).

The browser tests now test the media insertion dialog, and were updated a number of times to keep up with changes to VisualEditor. OOjs is now available in MediaWiki core for other users, and OOjs UI was extended, with additional widgets including checkboxes and generic labels. The automated testing system has been greatly expanded to cover script and input-method-editor issues, with an IME simulator able to check every change in the code for breaking any of dozens of known IME tools; further information about new IMEs can be added as it is gathered, and a tool to help collect this information is now available.

You can monitor the automated browser tests' results (triggered every twelve hours) live on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.23/wmf6 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2013-12-12 (MW 1.23wmf7)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.23wmf7 branch deployment on Thursday 12 December. In the week since 1.23wmf6, the team worked on some new features, performance and usability improvements, minor bug fixes and code infrastructure.

The most obvious change is that the toolbar has been simplified, moving all text styles (bold, italics, underline, subscript, etc.) into a single menu represented by a bold, italic and underlined "A"). This means that the not-very-helpful "More" menu has now become a menu to insert items (be they references, templates, media items or otherwise), so it has been re-labelled "Insert". This is an initial change seeking feedback as we improve the usefulness of the toolbar to wiki editors, rather than just providing a generic toolbar. Text styling is used relatively infrequently in wiki pages compared to the more important functions like links and references, so we want to make it take up less room so that there can be greater focus on the more common tasks.

A very basic new character insertion tool is now available, at the bottom of the "Insert" menu, represented with a capital Omega ("Ω") as seems to be common in other uses (bug 50296). It is an early version offered to get feedback on how the design could be improved and whether it is going in the right direction. Right now, the list closes immediately after you have inserted a character, and only a limited number of characters are shown (these can be altered by translators to provide more useful characters for each language).

As part of the work to create a simple insertion dialog for citation references, the transclusion dialog has been simplified. Now, the different transclusions and their parameters each show as part of a single, scrollable and tab-able pane (rather than on different panels that need to be clicked into), which takes up less time to edit and is more obviously of one piece. The "remove parameter" (or "remove template") link has been moved to be alongside the name of the parameter (or transclusion), and shows as the delete (rubbish bin) icon instead of as text. The tools at the bottom of the list of transclusions and their parameters that lets you add another transclusion or wikitext block now shows all the time, rather than when you hover over the "+".

The next steps with transclusions will be to simplify this further for the majority of use cases where only one transclusion is being inserted or edited, moving the ability to re-order the transclusions and insert new ones into an "advanced" dialog, to put the remove buttons in the navigation bar on the left rather than in-line (so you don't tab to them when filling out the form), and to move the "add parameter" function out of the flow of the editing and into its own panel. For the citation dialog specifically, a preview of the template will be available before it is inserted, and a button in the toolbar will let you insert a template-formatted reference directly (with one of a number of citation templates, defined by local admins).

Some other, more minor changes include adding the language name as well as language code to the (currently) read-only view of language links (bug 54086). The editor to add and alter equations and other mathematical formulae is now labelled "formula" rather than the cryptic "LaTeX" (bug 53251). When inserting some new "generated" content (like a reference, template, media item, etc.) the cursor will now be placed after the item, rather than the item being selected (bug 54957).

A number of bugs with the new functionality to allow pasting rich content copied from external sources were fixed, and deployed early to reduce the disruption they might cause. A bug in Firefox meant that pasting rich content over a certain length would result in spurious new lines being inserted (bug 58283). Trying to copy with no selection made caused a debugging cloud icon ("☁") to get inserted (bug 58138), and thereafter copying and pasting didn't work at all (bug 58346). Copying a link from within a VisualEditor instance into another caused it to be rendered as a broken link with [[ and ]] shown and an external URL in the middle (bug 58136). Pasting a table with a caption caused an error as the code to insert new content wasn't expecting text directly inside the table, only table rows and cells (bug 58318). Copying a template with a table inside it could sometimes move the table outside of the template call, duplicating it (bug 58241). Copying a reference list into a document with no references for it to list no longer throws an error (bug 58242).

We fixed a bug that meant that backspacing from a paragraph before a media item with a caption would move the text into the caption, rather than delete the image (bug 57927). A bad regression from a month ago that mean that inserting an item caused the editor to scroll to the top of the page was fixed and released early (bug 58090). Another regression, which mean that Firefox scrolled the page to the bottom on loading VisualEditor but left the cursor at the top was also fixed and released early (bug 58089).

The internationalisation system for VisualEditor has been switched over to the new JSON-based on (see the RfC for more details). The browser tests were updated to address the new changes (such as the moved transclusion removal buttons, and changes in Parsoid's defaults), and some speed and efficiency improvements were added.

You can monitor the automated browser tests' results (triggered every twelve hours) live on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.23/wmf7 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2013-12-19 (MW 1.23wmf8)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.23wmf8 branch deployment on Thursday 19 December. In the week since 1.23wmf7, the team worked on some minor bug fixes and improvements to code infrastructure.

Images are represented by Parsoid as <figure>s rather than MediaWiki's assortment of <div>s. Previously, these were converted by VisualEditor as a hack to make them look alike, but now we have implemented some CSS styling instead that should leave them looking the same, with less slow-down (bug 53436). This is a step towards the long-term goal of replacing the use of the HTML output from the MediaWiki PHP parser with the HTML+RDFa created by Parsoid. This would improve the usefulness of the site for mobile and API users, as well as making VisualEditor faster to load.

The Mobile team have enabled a limited version of VisualEditor as part of the "alpha" mobile channel (see for example a English Wikipedia article in alpha mobile mode); this was briefly broken due to a mis-configured dependency on ULS (bug 58551).The new rich pasting functionality had two bugs addressed – one where extra line-breaks were added in Chrome when pasting into an empty line (bug 58347), and another where an error was thrown for certain complex templates (bug 58421).

The generic MWExtensionInspector framework that new tools will extend now set the directionality of new items it create from the context, not the user's language, which means future extension editors will work in RTL and LTR environments (bug 57421).

A great deal of clean-up was done on the code repositories, ahead of splitting VisualEditor's core code away from the MediaWiki extension that uses it to edit a wiki. The intent is to make it easier for third parties who want to use VisualEditor for non-MediaWiki platforms (like WordPress or Etherpad) and encourage a focus on speed, efficiency and compatibility.

The automated browser tests were expanded to add a test for switching between edit modes and another for making multiple edits in the same session, adaptations to use the altered transclusion dialog workflow, text styling and insert menus, with timeouts added and tracking versions for Firefox and Selenium updated.

You can monitor the automated browser tests' results (triggered every twelve hours) live on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.23/wmf8 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-01-02 (MW 1.23wmf9)

There were no significant changes to the VisualEditor codebase that were merged for the MediaWiki 1.23wmf9 branch deployment on Thursday 3 January.

2014-01-09 (MW 1.23wmf10)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.23wmf10 branch deployment on Thursday 10 January. In the week since 1.23wmf9, the team worked on some minor feature improvements and bug fixes.

You can now edit some of the page settings in the "options" dialog – __NOTOC__ and __FORCETOC__ as selection (forced on, forced off, or default setting; bugs 56866 and 56867) and __NOEDITSECTION__ as a checkbox (bug 57166). Additional settings (like redirects and page displayed title editing) will be coming shortly.

VisualEditor now does not hard-code the presence of Commons as a potential source of images, but checks the relatively-new fileRepo API call, so third party wikis not using InstantCommons won't get erroneous results (bug 50673). We worked around a bug in CSSJanus that was wrongly flipping images used in some templates in RTL environments, affecting a highly-used hewiki template in particular (bug 50910). VisualEditor switched fully to the new format for using JSON for internationalised messages. VisualEditor now uses the new license-name value for $wgExtensionCredits for wikis with MediaWiki 1.23wmf9 and above (which falls back without error for older versions of MediaWiki).

We fixed a major issue due to an unannounced change in MediaWiki core, which caused VisualEditor to crash on trying to save (bug 59867). We adjusted the call to the API to fetch the language links in the settings dialog to be less server-intensive, and to recover from errors correctly, and corrected API calls in general to not send the edit token unnecessarily. We fixed an issue that meant that transclusions which inserted a text node followed by something else would render wrongly when inserted (but save correctly).

The automated browser tests were adjusted to speed them up and bind more correctly to list items in lists, and updated to a newer version of their ruby dependencies.

You can monitor the automated browser tests' results (triggered every twelve hours) live on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.23/wmf10 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-01-16 (MW 1.23wmf11)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.23wmf11 branch deployment on Thursday 16 January. In the week since 1.23wmf10, the team worked on some minor features, and fixing several bugs.

The toolbar's text styling drop-down now has a down-indicator like the Insert menu and the formatting menu. We tweaked the order of the toolbar to put the reference and media insert options at the very top of the menu, and move the character inserter down out of the way. Changing the categories of a page now triggers a refresh of the categories box at the bottom of the page once you've saved (bug 48560). There is now a (very basic) editor for <gallery>s, though no scope for inserting a new one or changing its display type yet. VisualEditor now has a keyboard shortcuts help page in the help menu, and available by its own keyboard shortcut Ctrl+/ or ⌘ Cmd+/ (bug 52844). When the page is loaded for editing, we no longer select the first node in the document if there's any text in it, but instead put the cursor just up-page of the first character (bug 58248).

We now only provide image resize handles on the "non-anchored" sides (so the bottom-right for left-aligned images and inline ones on LTR wikis, the bottom-left for right-aligned images and inline ones on RTL wikis, and both bottom corners for centred images), to avoid confusing behaviour where the resize handle let you drag the image into the wrong direction. In the transclusion dialog, parameters that are set using TemplateData to be 'required' now have a '*' symbol next to them to indicate this, but the requirement is not yet enforced (bug 53611). Template parameters are shown in the transclusion dialog using the recommended order specified in TemplateData; if no order is set, we use the order in which the parameters are declared in the template's <templatedata> block, or fall back to alphabetical order if that is missing (bug 51930). We have changed the encoding of the POST of the page HTML when saving which should reduce the amount of data sent over the network by ~40%, which will improve performance and reducing load when saving (bug 59660).

We fixed a major bug that meant inserting any template or other transclusion failed, and back-ported it to production so it should not occur anywhere (bug 59002). VisualEditor now removes, rather than just hides, the #contentSub links below the page title on old versions of pages or on sub-pages, so you can't accidentally click on the hidden-but-still-there text (bugs 52243 and 54325). We fixed a bug that meant that copying a link from one VisualEditor editor to another would result in some broken wikitext where you had an external URL given but in an internal link wikitext format (bug 58136). VisualEditor no longer throws an exception when the cursor is attempted to be put into a document with no content blocks, e.g. a document with 5 block images and no text (bug 59972).

You can monitor the automated browser tests' results (triggered every twelve hours) live on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.23/wmf11 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-01-30 (MW 1.23wmf12)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.23wmf12 branch deployment on Thursday 30 January. In the two weeks since 1.23wmf11, the team worked on some minor features and fixed several bugs.

You can now manually set the size of a media item shown as a thumbnail, rather than just with dragged out to that size, and set it to full size with a button. We are readying a tool that lets users set in-line language spans (of the form <span lang='xx' dir='yyy'>), and will offer it soon as a Beta Feature for users to give feedback (bug 47759).

We fixed a number of copy-and-paste bugs, including complete failure to copy references inside a single VE editor or between them (bug 60117), copying as just useless HTML in Firefox (bugs 59154 and 59171) or as a redirect (bug 59173), links between VE editors being broken (bug 58136), and copying image and templates not working from a Chrome VE instance into a Firefox one (bugs 59145 and 59170).

Two major issues with the new (very basic) editor for media galleries were fixed, which means you can now save the page after editing one (bug 60502) and insert one (bug 60307). Additionally, some "placeholder" text is provided to demonstrate how the existing gallery syntax works.

We found and correct an issue where creating a link at the end of a page would break the link inspector's appearance, making it unusable (bug 59776). Abandoning a page when you're mid-loading of VisualEditor no longer throws a Javascript error (bug 51546). We stopped the page title being mis-placed over the toolbar in the non-HD Vector use (bug 51000).

You can monitor the automated browser tests' results (triggered every twelve hours) live on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.23/wmf12 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-02-06 (MW 1.23wmf13)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.23wmf13 branch deployment on Thursday 6 February. In the week since 1.23wmf12, the team worked on some minor features and fixed several bugs.

You can now manually set the position and alt text of a media item shown as a thumbnail, and soon of all media items including inline ones too (bug 51293). We have also cleaned up the toolbars for references to prevent adding lists inside references, and galleries from both references and media item captions.

The displayed value of references in the list for re-using them now displayed again (bug 57209), and won't display the name of re-used references if it's just automatically named (bug 57875). A bug that meant that sometimes templates followed by lists would insert broken HTML instead of wikitext has been fixed (bug 60897). Pasting content into a part of the page that has restricted formatting, like headings in references or lists in image captions, now cleans them up (bug 59603). Stopping editing an empty formula, gallery or hieroglyphics block now will just not insert the block, rather than inserting a blank one (bug 60779).

You can monitor the automated browser tests' results (triggered every twelve hours) live on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.23/wmf13 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-02-13 (MW 1.23wmf14)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.23wmf14 branch deployment on Thursday 13 February. In the week since 1.23wmf13, the team worked on some minor features and fixed several bugs.

The link inspector now separates out redirects and disambiguation pages from "real" matching results, to help editors select the right link (bug 50240). The alert warning the user that wikitext has been detected on the page now automatically hides when it doesn't detect wikitext in the current paragraph, instead of staying present even once the wikitext has been removed (bug 51701). You can now convert block images between some different types (like thumbnail, framed and frameless), though inline images are not yet editable in this way (bug 38129). The cryptic counter for the number of bytes remaining next to the edit summary in the save dialog now has a tool-tip to make it slightly less mysterious (bug 50902). The drop-down menus in the toolbar for formatting a paragraph (heading, pre-formatted, normal) and styling a selection (bold, italics, underline) now have tool-tips to explain their purpose (bug 59719). In the transclusion dialog, when adding a new template which has at least one required parameter, it will be automatically-selected to making adding in details slightly easier.

A bug that meant that the "pipe trick" and a couple of other minor wikitext features appeared to not work in templates or gallery captions but which worked as expected on save, has been fixed (bug 60998). If you are adding a new block of content via an inspector, such as in a formula or gallery, and press the save button, VisualEditor no longer tries to save the version of the page before your addition was made (bug 60837). Making formatting changes like turning something into a list now doesn't have any action when applied to content blocks like images which can have sub-contents like a caption, which was confusing (bug 60969). VisualEditor now shouldn't throw up a Javascript error when navigating away from the page during load (such as clicking "edit", then "read" before it has loaded).

We fixed a bug in Flagged Revisions which meant that it inserted its tabs in between VisualEditor's edit tab and the wikitext editor tab (bug 52848). We fixed a bug in the position of the VisualEditor toolbar in Vector skins caused by a change in that skin, and made it available to affected wikis (bug 61224). MediaWiki can now recognise Amazon Silk's built-in browser, which means that it can be added to the VisualEditor blacklist as requested some time ago due to Silk being incompatible (bug 50777).

A bug that meant that the media dialog's size controls would show the previous value rather than the new value until the page was saved has been fixed and made immediately available to affected wikis (bug 61052). The "make full size" button in the media dialog wasn't working when the size was default; this has been corrected (bug 61270). We fixed a regression that meant that adding a section specifier to an existing link (so changing a link target from "Foo" to "Foo#Details") didn't update the link (bug 61221). A number of bugs and complications blocking the integration of VisualEditor with Mobile were fixed (including bug 60912).

You can monitor the automated browser tests' results (triggered every twelve hours) live on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.23/wmf14 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-02-20 (MW 1.23wmf15)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.23wmf15 branch deployment on Thursday 20 February. In the week since 1.23wmf14, the team worked on a number of minor features and fixed several bugs.

You can now set a page to be a redirect in the "page settings" dialog, accessible via the page menu next to the "Cancel" button in the toolbar, and options for page indexing and new section edit links in a new "advanced settings" pane (bugs 47328, 57167, 57168 and 57173). This also means that VisualEditor is no longer disabled on redirect pages, as you can now do something useful there (bug 50878). There is now a preview of the (currently wikitext) edit summary in the "Review your changes" pane (bug 42139).

You can now launch the save dialog with a keyboard shortcut – Ctrl-Alt-s or ⌘-Opt-s, or something similar depending on your system (bug 50897), which should be visible in the keyboard shortcuts menu, now scrollable (bug 60180) and able to take MediaWiki- rather than VisualEditor-specific shortcuts. The width of the "alt text" box in the media dialog was expanded per request (bug 61329). The reference and reference list dialogs now show "General references" as placeholder text in the group box when it's empty, to make its purpose slightly less confusing (bugs 55725 and 59180). The generic extension inspector system now lets users edit existing attributes, though not yet add new ones.

We restored the broken drop-down indicator on categories in the page settings dialog which broke some time ago (bug 61571). A bug in rich pasting that could cause a crash if you copied some unusual forms of HTML has been fixed (bug 61332). We fixed a bug that meant some rare instances of styled text couldn't have the style changed because of the structure of the wikitext (bug 52517). A bug that meant centred images were difficult to un-select was fixed (bug 61001). We also fixed a bug that meant failed searches would cause the media search box to keep spinning (bug 61392).

We also made some back-end changes to make things easier for the Mobile team to style and integrate VisualEditor, including splitting out skin-specific styles from VisualEditor (bug 60542), and letting OOjs UI be theme-able so that teams with specific design requirements can implement them.

You can monitor the automated browser tests' results (triggered every twelve hours) live on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.23/wmf15 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-02-27 (MW 1.23wmf16)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.23wmf16 branch deployment on Thursday 27 February. In the week since 1.23wmf15, the team worked on a number of minor feature improvements and fixed several bugs.

New media items now insert at default size, and not with a custom size (bug 50379). Default-sized media items now show at the wiki's set default size, and not just an arbitrary default size (bug 47804). The media item dialog now has a "make default size" button alongside the custom-size functionality in the "advanced" pane of the dialog (bug 61323). The media editing dialog's tool to set position (floated left/centre/right, or not floated) has been improved to use an explanatory checkbox for the unusual "not floated" case (bug 61155). In the transclusion dialog, parameter's entry boxes now expand to fit their contents, so that lengthy contents of parameters aren't obscured from view (bug 61289), and the size of parameter titles in their sections is now the same as for the name of templates and other transclusions.

Text which is _subscripted will have that styling removed when you make it ^{superscripted}, and vice versa, to avoid encouraging users to make a confusing mess of styling (bug 53330) – existing content styled as both super- and sub-scripted will be left alone unless an editor changes it. The tool to set redirects in the options dialog was tweaked to stop people editing the input field unless they have enabled the checkbox (bug 61864), and not let the user set a "static redirect" flag if there's no redirect on the page (bug 61865).

If the edit summary is empty, we no longer uselessly preview it in the Review Changes panel (bug 61716). The selection (or cursor if there is no active selection) will now remain in place if you change the format of the paragraph you are editing to a heading or pre-formatted (bug 57552). If you start editing a page with VisualEditor, and then switch to source mode, your edit will be tagged with "visualeditor-switched" (bug 56465). Categories which have __HIDDENCAT__ set on them, and so won't display in the page's category footer on save, now explain what that means in their drop-downs in the page options dialog (bug 50763).

The resize widget, which used to appear on all four corners of media items, has been changed from an inexplicable black dot which previously made more sense into a diagonal double-headed arrow. The size of thumbnails is now limited in some circumstances where appropriate, with other rules about sizing to come soon. Language-custom text styling icons were added for Arabic (bold: ع and italic: م), Finnish (bold: L, italic: K and strikethrough: Y ), and Kölsch (bold: F and italic: S). If your language would benefit from these, please request them on Bugzilla (or the feedback page).

There was a brief bug in the deployment of the latest version of code, including VisualEditor, to most wikis last week which meant that for VisualEditor would not load for some users (bug 61759). We fixed a bug that meant un-listing a bulleted list item containing only a floated item (like an image) crashed the editor (bug 58060). A bug in the mobile code that created huge shields that covered the editing surface in mobile mode, making changes impossible, was fixed (bug 60841).

The browser tests were cleaned up, and can now be run in "headless" Firefox mode by anyone, as well as on the testing service the Foundation uses. The old, currently-unused SyntaxHighlight code editor plug-in has been moved to that extension's code repository. The MediaWiki extension for VisualEditor was split up into modules so that the bits that Mobile doesn't need to load yet can be avoided (bug 61075).

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 1.23/wmf16 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-03-06 (MW 1.23wmf17)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.23wmf17 branch deployment on Thursday 6 March. In the week since 1.23wmf16, the team made a big simplification to template editing, as well as a number of minor feature improvements and fixes for several bugs.

Editing transclusions and (particularly) editing templates has been made much simpler, with a simple, small version of the transclusion dialog, now called the template dialog, that removes most of the controls that are only rarely used. The layout has been simplified to reduce whitespace, make the form much more compact for normal uses, and make it easier and simpler to see what each parameter does. You can switch back and forth between the simple and advanced mode by pressing a button labelled "Show options" (or "Hide options") if you need one of the tools, such as for multi-part templates (bugs 51135, 51672, 52576, 52753, 55434, 61402, 61529, and 62142). The template dialog's parameters now expand on display, rather than needing to be clicked on the first time, and are limited to 10 rows (bug 62084).

Following on from last week's work on default media item sizes, the media editing dialog had a number of improvements made to it to simplify the options and make them slightly closer to what MediaWiki encourages users to do. Most obviously, the position (left/right/centre) buttons now have little icons to demonstrate how the content will flow around them; the item type setting added "basic" (for images with none of "thumb", "frame" or "frameless" specified) and moved "border" to be an option that can only be used for frameless and basic items. The "set to full size" option has been moved to be one of the three sizing options, alongside default and custom size; default is now only available for thumb and frame images, as frameless and basic images don't use thumbnail size (bugs 61059, 61155, 61973, and 62024).

"Slugs", the fake blank lines inserted by VisualEditor next to items like images or templates to give you somewhere to put the cursor, now show as slightly smaller than a real blank line, and animate on hover and cursor entry, to highlight to users that they are different from actual blank lines (bug 47790). The initial styling was selected quickly to get this feature available to users for feedback, and is likely to change; suggestions are welcome, especially on how to communicate their intent.

We added support to VisualEditor for having multiple shortcuts for each command (bug 53356), which means that we have now been able to add ctrl+Y / ⌘ Cmd+Y as a second control for undo (bug 52140), ctrl+M / ⌘ Cmd+M for clear formatting, as used in OpenOffice (bug 56453), and ctrl+⇧ Shift+/ / ⌘ Cmd+⇧ Shift+/ for the shortcut dialog itself. The page menu button () now has a tooltip explaining what it is (bug 61892), and the "Insert" menu now has the same order in the toolbars on the media dialog's caption editor and reference dialog's content editor (bug 62286). Categories which are hidden show in their own section in the dialog when searching for them to add. An initial set of improvements to the special character inserter were done based on feedback; the insertion buttons now have much larger characters, are less "heavy" controls, and are the same width so they line up with each other. The keyboard shortcuts dialog now supports platform-specific messages, so Mac users will see the appropriate control codes.

A regression that meant that the save dialog stopped expanding when you switched to the "review your changes" panel has been fixed (bug 60494). We fixed a breakage from last week's image changes that meant that thumbnails with no position would display as only a couple of pixels wide, and released it immediately to existing wikis (bug 62013).

A very major change to how the "enter" key is handled in the core of VisualEditor was merged which fixed a few minor issues throwing errors (bug 59911), but shouldn't have any other effect. We fixed a bug that threw an error when you opened a page which had a floated item (like an infobox or a media item) in a bulleted list item (bug 62022). There was a bug that meant that on opening the page settings dialog the focus was still on the main document, so typing still affected that one (bug 62027). We fixed an issue that meant that objects with "phantom" blue boxes showing that they were selected, once made invisible, didn't have their phantoms disappear (bug 61390). A bug that meant undoing creating an empty heading caused an error was fixed (bug 62088). The formatting menu to set heading, pre-formatted or paragraph no longer responds to right clicks in some browsers (bug 61856). Text inputs now show up as grey when disabled, to make them look less similar to enabled ones.

The back-end of VisualEditor and its UI framework, OOjs UI, were both modified significantly to support re-use by other teams, notably including the Mobile and Multimedia teams at WMF.

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 1.23/wmf17 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-03-13 (MW 1.23wmf18)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.23wmf18 branch deployment on Thursday 13 March. In the week since 1.23wmf17, the team made some minor feature improvements and fixes for several bugs.

The reference dialog has been shrunk to feel less overwhelming, down to the "medium" dialog size. The reference list dialog has also been shrunk, down to a new "small" dialog size, as there is only one option to display to users. The template, transclusion and reference list dialogs now say "Insert template" or similar rather than "Apply changes" when inserting a new one (bug 50998). Searching when adding parameters in the template and transclusion dialogs is now case insensitive, like wikitext (bug 51673). Required parameters now have an indicator next to them in the template and transclusion dialogs when being edited, and not just in the screen when adding them. If a template has not yet had any TemplateData specified, or does but is lacking a description, the template and transclusion dialogs now provide a link to the template's page to avoid leaving users stranded.

We made some minor fixes to the media editing process, including showing and hiding the zoom icon when changing item types to or from thumbnail (bug 62139), showing the right numbers in the size boxes for thumbnailed media items smaller than the default size (bug 62293), and avoiding size figures being shown unrounded (bug 62279). We tweaked the visual treatment for "slugs", the fake blank lines inserted by VisualEditor next to items like images or templates to give you somewhere to put the cursor, and ensured that they shrink back when you click onto a template, image or other block item (bug 62285). There is now a slightly nicer error message given when VisualEditor finds that it is unable to load due to an error on the back end (bug 50475).

A bug related to editing after deleting an image and then typing without changing the cursor position was fixed (bug 62235). When you exit from VisualEditor after visiting it directly (i.e. going to a VisualEditor link directly rather than clicking "Edit"), we now remove the ?veaction=edit from the address bar (bug 57901). We fixed a minor bug that threw a Javascript error just as you switched from VisualEditor into wikitext editing mode (bug 62544).

VisualEditor now defaults "out of the box" to being active in the User: namespace as well as content namespaces, which is how it is configured on Wikimedia wikis already (bug 57104). We generalised the performance tracking framework for VisualEditor so that it can be used on mobile and desktop alike. The OOjs framework that VisualEditor relies on for class operations had a new feature added for referencing a class's parent, presaging the release of a new minor version, 1.0.8; this is now available in MediaWiki and VisualEditor. The OOjs UI framework that VisualEditor relies on for user interface widgets was improved to add indicator and icon widget classes, had its file naming simplified, and dialogs' pre-set sizes were made a little taller. By community request, VisualEditor is now available to all logged-in and logged-out users on the French Wikiversity (bug 62045), bringing the number of public Wikimedia wikis with VisualEditor "on by default" to 165.

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 1.23/wmf18 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-03-20 (MW 1.23wmf19)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.23wmf19 branch deployment on Thursday 20 March. In the week since 1.23wmf18, the team made some feature improvements and fixed several bugs.

You can double click to open the dialog of a node like an image or template, or press enter when it is selected, to make changes much more quickly (bugs 50996 and 54827). Pages that don't exist now show as red links in the editing surface as you edit (bug 37901). Dialogs are now all a little taller in their maximum height.

VisualEditor now won't be offered on translated pages (like Help:VisualEditor/User guide/de), and on translatable pages (like Help:VisualEditor/User guide) users will be warned that the page is delicate and may break (bug 50284). If you are editing a protected page, you will now get the full warning edit notice, including the most recent log entry (bug 51215). The input box for setting DEFAULTSORT and the target of a redirect in the page settings dialog is now a little wider (bug 51012).

A bug that meant that sometimes text would get "double-bolded", and empty links might get created with odd wikitext has been fixed (bugs 52189 and 62819). An issue that meant that pawn characters might be inserted in an empty table row has been corrected (bug 53214), switching from one "slug" empty line to another now animates correctly (bug 62783), and tabbing inside an unused empty line no longer breaks (bug 62657).

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 1.23/wmf19 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-03-27 (MW 1.23wmf20)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.23wmf20 branch deployment on Thursday 27 March. In the week since 1.23wmf19, the team made some feature improvements and fixed several bugs.

The work to build the citation dialog is now in testing; we expect to make it available soon, with a few more improvements (bugs 50110, 50768 and 63037). An advance in browsers' support has meant that we can switch to using DOMParser which in testing doubles the speed of certain operations; browsers that don't support the technology will fall back to the existing, slower method (bug 57586). Blocked users now get a notification that they are blocked from editing on load, rather than save (bug 52004). This message now shows the latest entry from the user's or IP's block log (bug 51454).

The search term for using an existing reference and inserting a new image is now cleared after each use (bug 61959). A bug that meant that new links on sub-pages (e.g. on a user sandbox) pointed to the wrong location until the page was saved has been fixed (bug 58314). A bug that meant some types of images would cause the media dialog to break the editor when opened was fixed and released early to all wikis (bug 62024). The edit notices pop-up now automatically scrolls when it's longer than the window. The internal VisualEditor API system now informs users that it only works in JSON, rather than breaking when they try to use it in a different format (bug 61017).

The browser tests were adjusted to improve the reliability of testing multiple edits, and take advantage of a new parameter to suppress the beta dialog on load. The OOjs UI's library styling was split into core styling with individual themes for Apex and a new one for Agora, as part of the work to make VisualEditor's UX integrate with existing mobile tools.

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 1.23/wmf20 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-04-03 (MW 1.23wmf21)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.23wmf21 branch deployment on Thursday 3 April. In the week since 1.23wmf20, the team planned out how to tackle some future changes and fixed several bugs.

The team fixed two bugs created in the previous week's work, and ensured that the fixes were released to production before they affected content wikis. First, a bug with extending links that meant adding a space after a link would throw an error was fixed (bug 63333). Secondly, the position of the parameter icons in the transclusion dialog were mis-placed and over-lapped the text (bug 63157).

Trying to create a link over an image with a caption no longer sets the caption's text to have that link (bug 60804). Deleting everything on a page which contains a reference with a link in it no longer leaves the link around to trigger a mistaken link inspector (bug 63208). A bug that meant that using the forthcoming citation system when something else was selected would fail has been fixed (bug 63452).

The "Return to save form" button in the "Review your changes" (diff) pane of the save dialog is no longer green and on the left, which is reserved for "constructive" actions like actually saving the page. The media search interface now fetches 20 rather than 15 images each time. VisualEditor's debugging bar is now available inside the MediaWiki instance to help fix issues found in production.

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 1.23/wmf20 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-04-10 (MW 1.23wmf22)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.23wmf22 branch deployment on Thursday 10 April. In the week since 1.23wmf21, the team planned out how to tackle some future changes and fixed several bugs.

In the template dialog, adding a parameter now only shows three options at first, rather than all available ones. The second edit tab – either the wikitext editor's "Edit source", or VisualEditor's "Edit" or "Edit ^beta" – will now fold into the drop-down menu if there's not enough space on the user's screen (bug 50225). The size changing controls in the media editing dialog have been simplified to have "make full size" be a secondary button and the size values be shown as "width x height px" on a single line.

A number of urgent changes were made to the OOjs UI framework, with related changes in VisualEditor, that caused and later fixed some breakages to the testing site; these were released early (bugs 63484, 63544, 63547, 63554). A change from last week that meant that tools needed to be updated wasn't applied to the switching to source editing and formula editing tools; these were fixed and released early to avoid disruption (bugs 63505, 63541).

Changing the format of a list item which has a listed nest inside it no longer breaks (bug 63209). Double-clicking on a hieroglyphics node now opens that inspector (bug 63651). A bug that meant that applying a link to a selection of text which already had a link in it failed was fixed (bug 63386). We also fixed a bug that meant that switching to wikitext always triggered an edit conflict warning for logged-out editors (bug 56835).

Content should now not 'flash' when the window is resized in some cases. Some potential issues related to the focus changing when closing and opening dialogs and inspectors were cleaned up. Text directionality is now stored in the data model rather than the editing surface, which should fix some future issues with dialogs opening in RTL wikis with LTR content blocks. The preference to disable VisualEditor for the wikis which are in opt-out state has been moved from the "beta" section of MediaWiki's editing preferences to the "editing" one, as part of the fallout from that section being removed (bug 28555). OOjs UI was tweaked to display labels next to fields now grey out in sync with the field they describe.

The browser tests were updated to point to a simpler, less fragile locator for the list buttons, and fixing the edit mode switching test to actually fail when it breaks. The continuous integration system has a new tool, "banana-checker", to ensure that every new message has documentation before it is merged.

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 1.23/wmf21 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.