VisualEditor/changelog/Archive/MediaWiki 1.24

 2014-04-17 (MW 1.24wmf1)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.24wmf1 branch deployment on Thursday 17 April, the first alpha build of MediaWiki 1.24. In the week since 1.23wmf22, the team made some major infrastructure changes and fixed several bugs.

Adding a category which redirects to another category now prompts you if you want to pick the redirect target instead (bug 52414). The new "View on Commons" tabs for pages of files hosted on Commons rather than locally now adjust for VisualEditor correctly too (bug 63666). VisualEditor now integrates better with the Education Program's pages, working around a bug in their display (bug 53477). The media editing dialog now lets you set border status on frameless and basic media items, not framed and basic ones. The forthcoming citation dialog was simplified further, removing the "more options" button, preventing the citation menu from becoming too long, and correcting an off-by-one error in the parameter search widget that said there were four more parameters to show when there were only three.

A change last month that caused a bug where the back button stopped taking you out of VisualEditor was fixed (bug 63739). A typo that meant that clicking the "Advanced settings" option from the Page Options menu didn't take you to the right pane was corrected (bug 63984). Adding a references list when selecting another item like an image now works as expected (bug 61885).

An issue with tabbing between template parameters in Firefox needing to be done twice to select the right item was fixed (bug 62841). Another issue with Firefox that led to icons in dialogs like references, media and templates being shown in the wrong places was also corrected (bug 63127). The keyboard shortcuts help page now uses <kbd> rather than <div> elements to style the keyboard shortcuts (bug 63767).

A pair of major changes to how the internals of VisualEditor work, allowing null selections of the document (bug 59868) and cleaning up how focussed elements work (bug 62410), briefly led to a number of bugs emerging during development, all of which were fixed before deployment (bugs 63909, 63943, 63945, 63954, 64012, 64013, 64032, 64034 and 64042). Some of these changes were made as part of fixing the formula editor and reference editing which were broken last week by some related improvements; the fixes to those, as well as a bug on opening VisualEditor on redirect pages, were released early (to wmf22) so that users were not disrupted (bugs 56645, 63785 and 63828).

The browser tests were updated to pass in both Chrome and Firefox, and cope with the save page taking longer than anticipated.

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 1.24/wmf1 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-04-24 (MW 1.24wmf2)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.24wmf2 branch deployment on Thursday 24 April. In the week since 1.24wmf1, the team made some minor feature improvements, some infrastructure changes, and fixed a number of bugs.

Dialogs now use a "pending" animation of moving diagonal lines such as in the template and the save dialogs, instead of the previous animated GIF images. The animation of opening a template dialog should now be smoother and not open and then close a tray. The content language editor, soon to be released as a Beta Feature, now uses a simplified ULS interface rather than the whole one. A careful audit of all Wikimedia wikis led to fixing broken local MediaWiki:Common.js (and similar) pages; these were each fixed to ensure that VisualEditor runs on all of them (bug 60842).

Edit notices for globally-blocked users and cascade-protected pages now show correctly (bugs 53009 and 53893). The "Print/Export" MediaWiki tools are now hidden whilst VisualEditor is active (bug 57940). The preference to not warn a user when they leave the editor mid-edit is now functional in VisualEditor too (bug 51057). When editing categories, you can now set or change the __HIDDENCAT__ and __NOGALLERY__ attributes if you so wish (bugs 57169 and 57170). In preparation for VisualEditor working better on multi-script wikis like Chinese, on those wikis you can now set or change the __NOCONTENTCONVERT__ and __NOTITLECONVERT__ attributes (bugs 57171 and 57172). The dummy "wikihiero" hieroglyphics editor, available on testing wikis as a demonstration editor, now updates live, like the formula editor did before. 

VisualEditor now uses Parsoid, not MediaWiki, to preview fragments of the page (like new or updated templates); there should be no obvious changes, except a slight speed improvement (bug 48524). The calls to parse edit notices and templates were corrected to know the context of the page, and not just mysteriously claim to be run on the API (bugs 50172 and 63600). Similarly, pre-save transforms (like converting template substitution calls or the "pipe trick") are now performed when the edit's preview of the wikitext diff is shown in the save dialog (bug 52345). The language links page is now populated for non-articles like categories and user pages as well as articles (bug 49226).

A bug with an improvement to inspectors' support for forced language directionality was fixed and released early to avoid breakage (bug 64072). A bug with the forthcoming mobile integration of VisualEditor that meant re-opening the editor would break nastily was also fixed and released early (bug 64034). Another bug with mobile which meant that the code to fetch a new edit token if your edit timed out was missing, breaking the editor; this was fixed (bug 64267). VisualEditor now works around a browser bug in Chrome that wrongly doesn't show a bullet for blank bullet list items other than an image inside it (bug 64117).

A bug that meant that existing <strong> tags on the page would make adding boldness to a selection irreversible was fixed (bug 64244). Some fixes were made to the soon-to-be-arriving citation dialog (bug 64199).

In preparation for the formula editor being made available to all users, some minor issues were corrected, including inserting a new formula into a "block slug" (bug 58286), trying to insert a formula when a template or reference was selected would crash (bug 56644), and inserting one when selecting an image would cause the formula to try to be inserted into the image's caption (bug 58045).

An issue that meant that clicking out of an inspector wrongly caused the selection to get restored was corrected (bug 63906), as was an unrelated issue that meant that inserting a new reference would move the cursor to the top of the document (bug 64041); this last one was released early to prevent disruption for a key community workflow. A bug that meant that one of the FlaggedRevisions-related checkboxes didn't show up inside VisualEditor's save dialog was fixed (bug 59608). VisualEditor now updates local Javascript variables to help other gadgets that use the page revision IDs (bug 56532).

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 1.24/wmf2 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-05-01 (MW 1.24wmf3)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.24wmf3 branch deployment on Thursday 1 May. In the week since 1.24wmf2, the team made some feature improvements and fixed a number of bugs.

External links are now styled like in MediaWiki, in a lighter shade of blue, in the editor and link suggestions box (bug 38726). The layout of template dialogs has been tweaked to put the label above rather than next to the parameter input fields. As part of this, the TemplateData documentation for a template can now mark a parameter as "suggested", one step down from "required"; these are automatically added to a new template use by VisualEditor. The template dialog now indicates parameters that have been marked as "deprecated" (bug 53612). The formula editor Beta Feature will now be available to all users, without having to opt in. A new language editor Beta Feature will be available for testing. The media editing dialog now has little icons as well as words to represent the type states (frame, frameless, thumb and basic) on the buttons. The forthcoming citation system now only shows its icon, and not that for generic references too, when selected.

A bug in the recent changes to the fonts in the default ("Vector") skin meant that the text was all cramped; we fixed the bug in Vector (bug 63985) and made related changes to restore the editing surface inside VisualEditor to be the same (bug 64599), and release both of these early to avoid disruption. A bad bug meant that the initial cursor position inside references was in an invalid place for users of Firefox, which caused the editor to crash if you tried to insert a template without having first clicked into the reference; this was also released early (bug 64434). An issue that meant quick typing into a reference dialog could corrupt the order of the characters in Firefox was also fixed (bug 64399).

The save dialog no longer prompts you for a second CAPTCHA if you've correctly filled out the first one but then reviewed your changes before trying to save (bug 62766). We fixed a bug that meant that pressing tab inside the formula editor threw an error (bug 64451). The citation editor was fixed to focus on the new field when adding parameters (bug 64098). A bug that meant that the search results list in the template dialog and similar places could end up stuck in Firefox if you didn't click into it was fixed (bug 64334). An issue with the forthcoming Table of Contents code meant that it failed to display the "hide" text correct; this was fixed. VisualEditor no longer puts second edit links next to the sections of remote files (like those on Commons), as we cannot tell whether the remote wiki has VisualEditor installed (bug 54259).

VisualEditor now uses Parsoid's styling module to share content styling with the Flow, Mobile, and other teams consuming Parsoid's output (bug 63983). A new class is now added to protected pages being edited with VisualEditor, which allows wikis to style the page in the same way they do for wikitext pages (bug 50783). The code to handle Monobook-specific issues in the MediaWiki integration was cleaned up as part of fixing a bug where the "edit source" tab was not selected correctly (bugs 49407, 64646 and 64672). On (non-Wikimedia) wikis where VisualEditor is opt-in directly rather than through Beta Features, the list of namespaces is now generated automatically rather than manually in the description (bug 51411). VisualEditor now supports QuestyCaptcha and MathCaptcha for wikis that use them. We made a further set of simplifications for dialogs, creating "ActionDialog" and a more specific "NodeDialog" framework, to make the code simpler and easier to extend. The browser tests were sped up, avoiding login where possible.

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 1.24/wmf3 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-05-08 (MW 1.24wmf4)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.24wmf4 branch deployment on Thursday 8 May. In the week since 1.24wmf3, the team made some minor feature improvements and fixed a number of bugs.

The new citation system was enabled on the English Wikipedia for feedback ahead of rolling it out for more wikis. In templates, transclusions and citations, parameters are now labelled "fields" to avoid a technical term that was confusing for users. The language search widget was improved to show search results clearly when finding results in languages other than the one you typed in. The mobile alpha build of VisualEditor added support for citation editing using that interface, too. Some improvements were made, particularly in animating the toolbar, which should make the transition between read mode and edit mode should have fewer visual shifts (bug 64751).

An issue that meant editing a citation would duplicate it rather than update it was fixed and released early to avoid disruption (bug 64717), as was a fix for the location of the new language Beta Feature's pages.

Some template layouts which were previously getting broken due to using CSS hacks, such as the English Wikipedia's football kit template, should now appear correctly; this change should also slightly improve performance (bug 52499). The notices shown to the user on saving have now been merged into those in the wikitext editor, for consistency (bug 52871). The styling of the formatting drop-down has been synchronised with the "Typography refresh" changes to Vector (bug 63540). A bug that meant that VisualEditor would not navigate to the section if you entered a section-edit VE link manually rather than from the read page was fixed (bug 52566).

The citation tool was adding an unnecessary stray line break at the end of the wikitext, which has been fixed (bug 63128). A UI issue that meant that a drop-down menu could remain open inside a dialog when you switched to other panes in Firefox has been fixed (bug 64334). The keyboard shortcut dialog was wrongly listing the shortcuts for changing formats on Macs; these have been corrected (bug 64771).

The browser tests were significantly improved to more simply locate the editing surface, to avoid logging in where possible, and to re-use the browser test templates for many of the existing tests. The documentation system moved further towards automatically publishing documentation for all VisualEditor-related tools, starting with OOjs whose documentation is now published.

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 1.24/wmf4 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-05-15 (MW 1.24wmf5)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.24wmf5 branch deployment on Thursday 15 May. In the week since 1.24wmf4, the team made some performance improvements, added some minor features, and fixed a few bugs.

VisualEditor's buttons and icons are now keyboard-accessible (bug 62337), which will make things quicker for experienced users as well as more available for users of assistive devices like screen readers. VisualEditor now shows a clearer message when you cancel out of an edit, in a custom alert window rather than using the browser default alert (bug 50955).

The initial first-use welcome dialog is now hidden for logged-in users using a user preference rather than a cookie (bug 55551). This means it will not show several times when people use multiple browsers or computers, though will cause the dialog to show up one last time for all logged in users on their next VisualEditor use, and then go away entirely.

The media dialog now shows a message if no media items are found, rather than mysteriously leaving you with a blank results page (bug 52469). The "keyboard shortcuts" link has been moved from the page options menu to the help menu, where it is more reasonable for people to look for it.

The new citation dialog tool now matches citation references with templates specified in a different case or with underscores rather than spaces compared to the "main" name of the citation templates (bug 63129), and the dialog's title now displays the name in the correct form; these two fixes were pushed out early to all users.

We worked around a problematic bug in Firefox that meant that selecting the entire page with Ctrl+A (Cmd+A on Mac) would select more than the whole document, causing a fatal Javascript error if e.g. you tried to delete it (bug 64917). A bug in using Ctrl+cursor keys (Opt+cursor keys on Mac) in Hebrew due to us missing out a part of a recent Unicode upgrade was fixed (bug 64872). PageTriage's hovering triage bar now is hidden when you enter VisualEditor (bug 56731).

The pop-up note shown to users of 'greylisted' browsers that might not work well but are not fully supported, like Opera, now also appears the second time you open VisualEditor on the same page (bug 65236). The notice about an edit being saved was corrected to not claim a page was restored for VisualEditor edits which switch mid-edit to using the wikitext editor (bug 65269). A minor flash that happened on the second (VisualEditor) section edit link when pages were loaded has been fixed.

VisualEditor now provides a hook for extensions, plugins, gadgets and scripts when it activates and deactivates, allowing them to know when to hide or show items at the right time (bug 65320). Some performance improvements were made to the code that is used when you press delete or backspace, special-handling code for triple-click mouse events, and removing a special-case for Internet Explorer being unable to understand zero-width spaces that isn't needed for IE9+ support. The system that prevents users from modifying the contents of templates (rather than their parameters) was made more efficient and stream-lined to improve speed and reduce impact on users' systems.

The stand-alone VisualEditor demo was adjusted to fix some directionality issues. The OOjs UI demo was significantly improved to make it easier to spot regressions and theme requirements, especially in the differences between desktop and mobile needs. The browser tests were re-factored to make a number of fixes and efficiencies.

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 1.24/wmf5 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-05-22 (MW 1.24wmf6)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.24wmf6 branch deployment on Thursday 22 May. In the week since the last deployment, the team made some minor features improvements, implemented a big infrastructure change for images, and fixed a few bugs.

The Cite system's label for a news source was changed from "Newspaper" to the simpler "News" (bug 65207). The wording of the welcome dialog (bug 57699) and the wikitext warning (bug 57700) now now both refer to the ability to switch to source mode whilst keeping your edits without saving. The dialog shown when you switch to source editing now uses a VisualEditor-style rather than browser native window, to give a clearer and more consistent interface; this also led to finding and fixing a bug in the VisualEditor-style warning windows being used twice on the same page (bug 65557).

Following some more extensive testing to ensure compatibility and no major issues, users of versions 15 and above of the Opera browser will no longer get a warning about their browser possibly not working. Opera below version 12 remains blacklisted, and users of Opera 12 will still get the warning. Also, the warning about a user's browser possibly not working now appears each time you click edit on the page, rather than just the first time.

A critical bug that meant that the new version of jQuery in MediaWiki broke all dialogs – like citations, templates, images and saving the page – in Firefox was worked around, and rushed out to avoid disrupting any users' edits (bug 65373). The "no results found" error message now disappears if you subsequently find some results for you image search.

If you edit a File: page, VisualEditor was previously hiding the image but not showing it again on save; it now does (bug 65349). When you open the save dialog, your cursor will now appear in the edit summary automatically again, even in Firefox (bug 65222); additionally, some styling fixes were implemented for the save dialog following recent changes in the system. The VisualEditor edit tab was sometimes able to appear in the Vector skin even on pages in namespaces where it is disabled, like Template:, due to a bug in Vector (bug 65294); we have worked around this (bugs 64142 and 65292).

The display for "phantoms", blocks inserted by VisualEditor to prevent editing parts of generated content like templates, was re-written, which should significantly improve the performance of this part of the system, particularly for pages with a lot of templates or images on them. A bug that meant that links could sometimes get their spaces converted to underscores was fixed (bug 62229).

In a major change to the infrastructure of VisualEditor, the basis for how images and other media files are manipulated through transactions was changed to use a model-centred approach. This opens up new possibilities, including editing inline images for the first time, and should not have any negative effects for editors, instead helping fix a number of minor bugs (bug 62293).

A hack that attempted to improve the way that up-/down-cursoring worked in Firefox was removed for performance reasons based on it not appearing to be needed any more. Some visual elements of the template editing system that aren't supported yet on Mobile are now hidden. The stand-alone VisualEditor demos system was improved to provide a mobile as well as desktop one.

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 1.24/wmf6 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-05-29 (MW 1.24wmf7)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.24wmf7 branch deployment on Thursday 29 May. In the week since the last deployment, the team made some minor features improvements and fixed a few bugs.

New icons for citations and references are now clearer more recognisable. The toolbar buttons for making lists and indenting items are now in a drop-down to avoid taking up so much space for less-used items. The gallery editor is now a bit wider to make it more useful, and the icon no longer appears in the toolbar as it's not hugely helpful. The category editor now suggests categories which exist (and used on at least one page) but don't have a page yet, and so show up as red when reading (bug 49044). We also now detect that a category is hidden if it was reached through a redirect.

If you use a template that is a redirect to another, we now fetch the TemplateData hinting for the target (bug 50964). VisualEditor can now be triggered through "system redirects" like Special:MyPage, so for example a link to Special:MyPage?veaction=edit can be provided to newbies to encourage them to create a user page (bug 50877). Users of version 5 of the Safari browser now get a warning that things may appear slightly broken, following some feedback about a browser bug there.

There were a number of issues related to images following on from last week's big infrastructure change for how they were handled; these were identified and fixed, and released early to avoid disrupting things for users (bugs 65564, 65596, 65611, 65615, 65617, 65836). An outcome of another big change is to avoid a Javascript error when hovering over some images (bug 65616), which was also released early.

A bug that meant the PageTriage palette would show up for some users after saving a page was fixed (bug 65702). Changing an image to be basic one now reflects the non-default changes you make to it in its wikitext again, which broke in March as part of a larger fix (bug 62852).

An issue that meant mobile targets could only create desktop- rather than mobile-style sub-surfaces (such as inside a reference dialog) was fixed to allow progress there (bug 65642). Mobile dialogs now use a "check" symbol rather than a button labelled "Apply changes" or similar, to be consistent with the rest of the mobile interface. The system switched to use new API calls provided in MediaWiki 1.23 to make things quicker for users and more efficient on the servers (bug 63555). Extensions can now add extra checkboxes for "meta data" in the page settings panel.

Raster browser support, which had been accidentally left in VisualEditor in a partial state, was removed; this means that browsers which do not support SVG now will not be able to load VisualEditor. Some documentation of how VisualEditor expects to work with skins was created to help third parties (bug 61500). VisualEditor no longer depends on a styling module provided by the Parsoid PHP extension, but instead on MediaWiki core's new (temporary) mediawiki.skinning.content.parsoid styling module instead. This has raised the compatibility requirement for the master branch of VisualEditor to 1.24.

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 1.24/wmf7 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-06-05 (MW 1.24wmf8)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.24wmf8 branch deployment on Thursday 5 June. In the week since the last deployment, the team made some minor features improvements and fixed a few bugs.

The citation tool now won't let you add empty citations (bug 64715). In the reference tool, "use an existing reference" is now shown in a disabled state when the reference has content, rather than hidden (bug 65689). A modified version of the link tool is now available for "simple links" (those that look like [1] rather than have a label). The appearance of the media search dialog was improved for users with a vertical scrollbar present all the time (bug 64911), and on sub-pages it only searches for the sub-page's name, not the whole path (bug 51290). When using VisualEditor on a Category page you now can see the category contents again after editing (bug 64239). The template and citation dialogs were modified to add some accessibility features (bug 65474). The mobile version of VisualEditor now has the "use existing reference" tool in its toolbar. The TemplateData GUI is now enabled on the Catalan Wikipedia, per community request (bug 65785).

An issue that meant that the welcome dialog would show on every edit for some users was fixed and pushed out to all wikis immediately, to reduce the inconvenience (bug 65821); our apologies! One big error with two major effects that broke VisualEditor for Firefox users was fixed and released early (bugs 65934 and 65935). A slip-up that meant that the "Cite" label in the toolbars in the media and reference dialogs was fixed and released early (bug 66039). When the toolbar is disabled, clicking an image on the page now selects it correctly (bug 65866).

Some further bugs related to edge cases with images were fixed (bugs 62893, 65564, 65886). A bug that meant using two confirm dialogs in one session would break was fixed (bug 65571). We fixed a minor bug with adding a category which has members but doesn't have a page yet (bug 66105). If you've written a TemplateData description for a parameter to just be a space character, we now won't show the information button as active (bug 65862).

VisualEditor removed the last vestiges of code that relied on jQuery 1.8.x (bug 65404), as part of the Wikimedia-wide upgrade work to jQuery 1.11.x (bug 65399). VisualEditor now asserts that it's running on MediaWiki 1.24alpha, given some changes made recently that require the content styling module only available there. Some minor improvements for better Microsoft Internet Explorer support were implemented.

The browser tests were adjusted to take account of the new toolbar layout for structure 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 1.24/wmf8 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-06-12 (MW 1.24wmf9)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.24wmf9 branch deployment on Thursday 12 June. In the week since the last deployment, the team made some features improvements, major internal code updates, and fixed a few bugs.

You can now, without need to editing them, see the target of a link, the template used by a transclusion and other information. To do this, the context menu of buttons is now vertical rather than horizontal, and uses the space to its side to display contextual information about where the cursor currently is, such as the target of a link, the language of an annotation, the image or template used in an invocation, or other information (bug 49928). Future planned improvements to this include showing how a reference will appear in the references list and using an extended set of controls to make quick adjustments on images (like moving them to the left or right), and provide a quick tool to open links' targets in a new window to check them out.

In the reference tool, you can now "use an existing reference" on an reference that you have blanked to convert it to re-use another (bug 65689). You can now set or edit a page's {{DISPLAYTITLE}} and __DISAMBIG__ status in the page settings dialog (bugs 56868 and 61073). This completes for now the set of "behavioural flags" intended to appear in page settings (bug 56865). The special character inserting tool is now wider and slightly lighter in design, and the order of the mathematical symbols has been corrected (bug 60626). The paragraph formatting menu now takes up a little less room, and looks more like a menu.

We fixed a bug that caused the cursor to not be focussed in the save dialog, and so which in Firefox led to it being possible to keep typing into the page when meaning to write the edit summary, along with a related bug that stopped users switching to "edit source" mode, and released the fixes early to all wikis so that they didn't affect editing for anyone (bugs 66168, 66222 and 66231).

The infrastructure for "generated" content like images, templates and references was re-written to be much faster and simpler, which also fixed a number of issues (notably bugs 55789 and 64563). When you drag-and-drop an image or a reference, we have corrected a bug so that the window no longer scrolls to the top (bug 65882). We corrected the save dialog to make sure that it requests the checkboxes' labels in your user-interface language correctly when you're over-riding it with the uselang= parameter (bug 65455). VisualEditor now performs much more like the wikitext editor when it comes to creating and editing pages with redirects in them, rather than sometimes following the redirects when you press edit (bugs 65621 and 65926).

We have re-worked the system for windows opening and closing, which has fixed a large number of issues. One of the problems this fixed is avoiding being able to accidentally double-click on a button and so try to edit an image twice, which would break badly (bug 66389). It also means that animations such as on the save dialog (bug 62859) and reference list dialog (bug 65705) are now corrected to not change their mind part-way through opening to instead open at a different size. In a related set of changes, a major piece of work on the link editing tool has implemented a large number of bug fixes, suggestions and improvements (bugs 52634, 54984, 55465, 55839, 57205, 60501, 60843, 62492, 62818, 62857, 65343, 66016, 66135 and 66139). As part of this, the link editor now does not show you a suggestion list until after you start to change the target, so that you can add a link without suggestions very quickly (bug 56434).

The category suggested and related tools were very broken for RTL wikis, which has been fixed (bug 65483). The language editing tool had a huge performance fix, correcting for the recent jQuery upgrade, reducing the load time from ~15 seconds down to about 0.6s (bug 65512). The work to iron out each of the image edge cases continued (bugs 65916, 66149, 66288 and 66291), with the need winding down to the point that we will soon be able to work on an improved interface instead.

The code module related to images was split into viewing and editing, so that mobile could pull in the former whilst not the latter. In line with VisualEditor-specific styling hacks being replaced with proper styling inherited from MediaWiki, the CSS code to auto-number simple external links was moved there. As part of making the stand-alone VisualEditor more than just a demo, the debug bar will now only be shown when requested rather than all the time, and some fixes were made so that you can run multiple VisualEditor surfaces in parallel on one page.

The browser tests were updated to check that the page options dialog is available and can be opened, modified to use the new browser test API for the login tests, and upgraded to work with the new move to the WMF-hosted Jenkins instance. 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 1.24/wmf9 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-06-19 (MW 1.24wmf10)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.24wmf10 branch deployment on Thursday 19 June. In the week since the last deployment, the team made some feature improvements, major internal code updates, and fixed a few bugs.

Drag-and-drop now highlights prominently when the item you are dragging will go (bug 51666), lets you drag-and-drop selections of content, not just images and templates (bug 49981), and only lets you put block items like images at the start of a paragraph so you don't accidentally split them (bug 65883). VisualEditor will now warn you about inserting wikitext into media captions and references like it does for the main document (bug 56213). The layout and usability of the language input tool was improved to make is easier and more obvious to use. The save dialog is now more like other dialogs, and the display of error cases is now clearer and more visible.

Inline templates (like "citation needed") now wrap correctly, and don't break the layout of floated items (bug 51708). The highlight outline shown when you make a selection that covers certain kinds of content that VisualEditor doesn't recognise ("inline aliens") now displays correctly when that content wraps over a line (bug 52339). As part of this, we also fixed a pair of issues related to the highlight shown around images and similar content when they were moved, altered or inserted (bugs 65706 and 65716). We changed the styling of paragraphs in tables so that they look much more like MediaWiki's view mode, without the padding that paragraphs get in the main document (bug 65416).

We fixed a bug that meant that the link editor would suggest any entry into with "http" or similar in it, even if not at the start, as a valid external link (bug 65547). When using VisualEditor on a section edit link, the view now scrolls to that section correctly (bug 65928). We fixed a bug that meant you couldn't type over a node (like an image) you had clicked on (bug 66638), and another which would throw a fatal error when inserting a new line after adding a Hieroglyphics block in Firefox (bug 66691). We also fixed a bug that meant that inline images being converted to floating and then back would display oddly (bug 65924).

We replaced the existing "shields" system of inserting image overlays above objects with a system of using browsers' native getClientRects function, which should make things faster for users, especially on mobile platforms, as well as more reliable and simpler code. Some accessibility improvements were made to the windowing system so that users of screenreaders should have a more reliable experience. The standalone VisualEditor demo now lets you edit the HTML live for better testing, and the debug bar appears in MediaWiki-VisualEditor when ?debug=true is set.

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 1.24/wmf10 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-06-26 (MW 1.24wmf11)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.24wmf11 branch deployment on Thursday 26 June. In the week since the last deployment, the team made some progress on major code updates and fixed a few minor bugs.

Otherwise un-styled tables now get a less strong visual styling by default, with dotted lines and smaller borders. This is the first step towards making tables' structure editable. We removed the hieroglyphics tool from the "experimental" system live on MediaWiki.org in preparation for making it available everywhere. As part of our work to support Internet Explorer, we worked around a bug that caused crashes when inserting content. We removed some systems that were meant to help IME (Input Method Editor) users, but instead got in their way and broke users of some other IMEs.

We corrected a bug that caused the context menu to briefly flash in and then disappear when you inserted a new cite, image, formula, etc. (bug 66855). We fixed a caching bug that meant that relocating an item would sometimes not work because the user's browser thought it was using a different item (bug 67040). The "make full size" button on default-sized images had an issue where it would initially switch which size button was enabled, but not update the size (bug 66863). We also adjusted a confusion in our code for templates where templates called "Foo.bar" would display – and try to insert – as just "Foo", and so break (bug 66893).

A bug made section editing the 'zeroth' (lede) section of a page with VisualEditor would instead scroll you all the way to the bottom; we adjusted the scrolling to fix this (bug 66674). A similar issue which we also fixed meant that inserting a formula on a page for the first time that edit would scroll the page all the way to the top (bug 66813). An old bug meant that trying to make a page link to a file or category would create a link not to the correct ":Category:Foo", or even to the naïve "Category:Foo", but instead to "::Category:Foo" (bug 50279).

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 1.24/wmf11 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-07-03 (MW 1.24wmf12)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.24wmf12 branch deployment on Thursday 3 July. In the week since the last deployment, the team improved a few features and fixed a number of bugs.

Saving a page should now be noticeably faster in most cases, as we have implemented a system to compress the data the browser sends to the server (bug 66914). We will later experiment to see whether this should only apply in some cases, like where the page is longer than a length, the users' browser is well-written, or their computer is fast enough. Once we have solid numbers we'll report on them in the metrics section of the roadmap. The "reference" tool, which creates a blank <ref></ref> without a template, has been moved from the "insert" menu to the bottom "Cite" menu, below the community-selected templates like "Cite web" which create proper citations on those wikis that have configured it.

When you add a new media item, you are now able to set the caption before it is inserted (bug 67170), and you can switch out the image used in an existing one without losing the caption and other settings (bug 51033). When you use the media search, it resets to the name of the page each time you use it (bug 65038). You are now offered a prompt to retain changes when switching to the "Edit Source" tab, rather than having to find the option in the menus (bug 57462), and closing from that offer won't switch you to the edit source tab throwing away your changes.

A number of additional icons in VisualEditor now show a flipped variant when users are in a right-to-left environment like Arabic or Hebrew. The help window listing keyboard shortcuts now uses a more normal format, showing commands at "Ctrl + K" rather than "CTRL+K". The "language" Beta Feature now shows up in the styling menu, rather than the "insert" menu where it didn't make much sense.

We fixed a problem where selecting a node like an image or a template with the mouse (but not the keyboard) would make it not let you use backspace or delete to remove it (bug 67178). If you click on something you can't currently edit, like a reference defined inside a template, you now won't be prompted to try anyway by the context menu (bug 67176). We also changed the context menu so it doesn't appears over the top of items like formulæ that you edit in-place (bugs 66542 and 67306).

We made a big change to how templates covering partial items, like templates that generate a row of a table, behave; this should significantly improve how they behave, as well as their initial appearance, though there remain some issues if you edit the templates themselves (bugs 50607, 50951, 58387, 64780 and 67169). We changed the behaviour of selections so that deleting a block item like an image no longer highlights the previous line (bug 67213).

On mobile, we fixed a number of issues. In iOS Safari, a clutch of browser bugs meant that highlights were being misplaced around (bug 67063), links would be followed rather than editable (bug 65326), items like references or images would need to be tapped on twice (bug 66999), clicking on a reference would navigate back to the reading page (bug 67002), and closing the link editor would show the link suggestions would show in the editor (bug 67399). We fixed an issue that meant the link editor could crash in mobile if the page was blanked (bug 65418), and that link suggestions would not appear (bug 66753).

The context menu on images in the captions of other images, or inside references, now is correctly aligned with the image rather than being off to the side (bug 66494). We fixed the ability to tab to various dialogs and controls for users of Firefox, working around a browser bug there (bugs 65554 and 66824). The display of the title for templates which have a full stop ('.') now shows fully, not truncated at that point (bug 66939). VisualEditor now finds the TemplateData for non-templates used in transclusions (bug 52609).

If you update the page's display title in the page settings dialog, the page title will be updated when you save the page (bug 50341). We corrected a bug which meant that if your preferences are set to remind you to fill in an edit summary and you didn't, you weren't able to save the page after you had corrected this (bug 67345). A bug for users of Opera 12 that meant that pressing Escape or Tab on an empty line inserted a pawn symbol was also fixed (bug 63630).

The standalone core of VisualEditor now has a single-file distribution for third parties (bug 66117), which also has RTL stylesheets rather than expecting third parties to use CSSJanus like MediaWiki does (bug 65057). Work to support Internet Explorer continues, as well as performance.

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 1.24/wmf12 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-07-10 (MW 1.24wmf13)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.24wmf13 branch deployment on Thursday 10 July. In the week since the last deployment, the team worked mostly on back-end code improvements, as well as fixing a few bugs.

The dialog for templates, as well as for citations and transclusions, would get confused when a page used a template with an HTML comment before the first parameter, and then crash badly; we have now worked around this (bug 66724). The label for the button to show additional fields in a template, citation or transclusion now says "more" rather than "other", in line with similar labels and for simpler and clearer translation.

We fixed a couple of annoying bugs with making images full size – the first meant that the first time you pressed the button it didn't do anything, but thereafter it worked OK (bug 66863), and the second that caused pressing the button to fail to activate the "Apply Changes" button (bug 67624). A minor issue that meant "vection=foo" parts of the URL weren't removed when the user saved or left the page was also corrected (bug 66237).

We also fixed a nasty, albeit rare, issue that caused VisualEditor to crash when changing the type of an image between two other images, each of which had images in their captions (bug 66604). In the media dialog, we tweaked the tab order to work better in some browsers, including Safari, so you can tab from the Caption to the Alt text field (bug 67162). For VisualEditor on mobile, we fixed an issue for iOS devices – when you opened the editor, there is no initial text cursor activation, which meant that if you immediately tried to select a reference or other node, the first time would only highlight, not select, it (bug 67389).

A minor bug meant that references would show up as bigger than normal due to a mistaken CSS class attribute, and a similar bug for references lists. A few fixes for particularly egregious issues with Internet Explorer 11 were made, disabling triple-click handling (which is broken for Windows 8 but intriguingly not Windows 7) and adding an IE-specific stylesheet that stops highlights on references being drawn in the wrong place, prevents resize handles appearing on headings, and makes highlights transparent rather than opaque.

The OOjs UI system was updated to not transplant disabled stylesheets into child iframes for windows (such as for the stand-alone VisualEditor's RTL environmental sheets). The VisualEditor debug bar now shows the from/to of the range rather than start/end, which is more useful for debugging. We began the transition to using browsers' native .bind() functionality rather than the previous system, as thanks to the ES5 shim we can now depend on that being available or poly-filled even for old browsers; we expect to finish this work next week (bug 62762).

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 1.24/wmf13 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-07-17 (MW 1.24wmf14)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.24wmf14 branch deployment on Thursday 17 July. In the week since the last deployment, the team worked mostly on landing a major design change including a re-write of the windowing system for mobile and desktop users alike, along with some minor feature changes and fixing a number of bugs.

The main change this week in a new design for all windows, with the main action buttons consistently in the top bar of each window, based on a new, more flexible technology back-end (OOUI). As part of this, we replaced almost the navigation icons with simple words, which we found in testing was much easier for users to understand. Now, the "safe" cancel/undo control will always be in the top left, and any progressive insert/apply control will be in the top right. Rarer controls will be at the bottom of the dialog or inspector.

These changes also mean that the desktop and mobile version of VisualEditor can now use the exact same code, with windows deciding based on your platform and browser size how to display themselves. As well as addressing some long-term issues and design problems, this fixed a number of outstanding issues (bugs 60501, 66552, and 65322) and the team whilst it was bedding in the change found a few more (bugs 68048, 68061, 68066, 68068, 68121, and 68180).

You can now open links easily inside the link editor, to check whether the external or internal link was the one you meant to choose (bug 54759). This is especially useful for users on touch devices or other systems where opening links in a new window is not as simple as other places. Finally, we have adjusted the behaviour of VisualEditor to more closely mimic OpenOffice and most other editors, so typing when selecting a node now doesn't do anything, except for delete or backspace to remove it (bug 67177).

Thanks to alert community members, we discovered and fixed a major backspacing problem caused by templates with multiple child elements – most visibly, the "lang-fr" and similar templates used widely on articles on the English Wikipedia (and others). This meant that pressing backspace would delete two or more characters, seemingly at random, and was sufficiently serious that we rushed out a fix to all wikis as soon as we were aware of the issue (bug 67985). Our apologies for the inconvenience, and our gratitude to the editors who highlighted the issue as soon as they noticed it. We also fixed an issue that completely broke the citation and template dialogs in wmf13's release last week, and immediately released it.

We fixed a number of bugs related to cursoring around nodes and slugs (blank lines where you can drop the cursor). Firstly, an issue with slugs at the end or beginning of a document would make your cursor get stuck in a loop, unable to escape (bug 67551). A browser bug in Firefox caused another issue meant that you would get pawn characters inserted and typing would happen backwards if your cursored off a node like a reference (bug 67432). We had a problem where selecting a node by cursoring would mean you couldn't move up or down with the cursor, and instead VisualEditor would throw an error (bug 67755).

We fixed an issue following-on from work last week, which was causing pages pulled from the User namespace as transclusions to be prefixed with an extra colon (bug 67386). We also corrected an issue with the language editor that would throw a (harmless) error when you were using it (bug 67609).

There were a couple of issues with changing media settings which either wouldn't apply some of the changes you made (bug 67687) or would not enable the "Apply changes" button (bug 67684). Editing blocks of content from extensions like SyntaxHighlight, Poem or Score now makes sure to display any HTML correctly, and prevent you from inserting faulty closing tags inside themselves (bug 57249).

We fixed a number of issues with the mobile interface for VisualEditor, ahead of its wider release, including restoring the Cite menu which had gone missing (bug 67701), showing link suggestions correctly in a few circumstances where it wasn't before (bug 66753) and stopping the cursor showing up from the document "through" the link editor's suggestions (bug 67388). The major re-write of how windows work has had big improvements for all windows on mobile, which was one of its primary objectives, and included improvements to the mobile context.

The performance of the toolbar floating over the top of content when the page is scrolled down was significantly improved. The code to resize items was converted to be static and use clone methods rather than create a handle for the image each time. The window manager now doesn't throw an error if you ask it to open a window it doesn't know about.

The stand-alone VisualEditor was improved with the demo being expanded to tests, and the stand-alone toolbar altered to have labels for each group, move the language tool into the styling group, adding a keyboard shortcuts help dialog tool to the previously-unused 'actions' part of the toolbar, and use a large '+' instead of a label for the insert menu.

Some of the related changes to OOjs UI included changing how delay works for OO.ui.Process, splitting out part of OO.ui.OptionWidget into OO.ui.DecoratedOptionWidget, and separating overall setup from setOutlineItem in OO.ui.PageLayout. Further, there were fixes for Internet Explorer support in hiding (rather than just setting to zero-width) unused GridLayout panels, mobile-friendly styling, some better accessibility improvements for forms, allowing arguments to be used for deferMsg, letting buttons open URLs with an href, stopping disabled tools from stealing the browser's focus, cleanups to and expansions of the demos and documentation, and several other changes.

In terms of breaking changes for VisualEditor, a very old hook in the MediaWiki extension, ext.visualEditor.editPageInit, was removed (it had been provided for backwards-compatibility for over two years). In the core VisualEditor, the afterRender method used by nodes to re-render themselves had the optional generatedContents argument removed; the only known user of this, in the Math extension's formula editor, was already adjusted to compensate.

The unit tests were expanded to better cover the image model, showing selections and making transactions around aliens, and the test/ directory was renamed to tests/ to be consistent with other Wikimedia repositories. 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 1.24/wmf14 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-07-24 (MW 1.24wmf15)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.24wmf15 branch deployment on Thursday 24 July. In the week since the last deployment, the team worked on a few new features and fixing a number of bugs.

You can now create, edit and view HTML comments, which are used occasionally as notes to future editors (bug 49603), though comments in some non-content locations like between two table rows won't appear as there's nowhere sensible to show them. We would greatly value feedback on whether this approach to this long-requested feature is useful. In the long-term it may make sense to provide a full Flow-based commenting system so that editors can see discussions about paragraphs as they are editing them, rather than encouraging the use of HTML comments which are difficult to follow.

You can now insert a re-use of an existing reference right from the "Cite" menu on desktop, rather than have to know that you can do this using the "Basic" option. This feature already existed on desktop, but now has an icon rather than just a mysterious blank square, and we fixed a bug where a "Go back" button would take you to a confusing screen (bug 68201). The "Cancel" button in the toolbar has been removed, as it was unnecessary and took up a lot of room compared to how often it was used; clicking on the "Read" tab takes users who wish to exit out of the editor, as does the "Back" button in their browser.

When you add a new template which has no suggested or required parameters in its TemplateData (or no TemplateData at all), we have changed the template tool to now prompt you to add parameters as that's often something you will want to do (bug 55925). On wikis where anonymous users are not able to create new pages, if a user has somehow ended up using VisualEditor anyway (such as through a manual link) we warn them that they won't be able to save on load, rather than waiting until they try to save (bug 67550). If you choose to switch to source mode without any changes being made, you won't be prompted to decide what to do about the changes… because you haven't made any (bug 68229). The command help dialog was adjusted to have a 'safe' (left side) closing button rather than an 'action' (right side) one, as closing it has no effect on the content.

An issue on Firefox with opening windows like the link editor would take five seconds instead of a few milliseconds the first time was fixed and released immediately to wikis (bug 68223). Another issue which we fixed and got out early meant that the messages for some dialogs wouldn't display correctly (bug 68327).

We fixed a big problem that was affecting the formula editor and similar tools that update as you type, causing them to close after each key press (bug 67326). The heights of various windows was adjusted, including the language editor (bug 68053), and the reference (bug 68232), references list (bug 68226), template, transclusion, and citation dialogs, so that they don't appear squished. We fixed an issue that meant pressing Return directly after a reference would throw an error (bug 68462).

Converting an auto-numbered external link to a normal one now retains annotations like it being bold or italic, as in other parts of the editor (bug 67377). A couple of issues with using the media dialog around changing sizes were also corrected (bugs 68000 and 68242). We corrected the reference dialog code which had stopped focussing the cursor on opening due to an oversight in the transition to use processes last week. We also fixed some issues related to handling the up and down cursor keys when you have selected a node.

We made some significant performance improvements in a number of areas, including opening the re-use reference tool, making selections across a large amount of content, choosing what to show in the context menu deleting or moving a list, resizing images, and pasting more than one paragraph in a large document (bug 68301). We also comprehensively switched from the jQuery to the browser native focus method for performance reasons, especially on mobile devices.

We set up a monitoring bot to scan for "visualeditor-needcheck" edits to make sure that any issues that might cause corruptions from VisualEditor are highlighted to the team as quickly as possible (bug 62860). The re-render flash in debug mode is now more prominent to make it easier to see what is going on. VisualEditor-MediaWiki no longer checks for OOjs and OOjs UI to be present, as MediaWiki 1.24 (on which it depends) provides it anyway. We removed the "live" event from the codebase (except internally within ve.ce.Surface), preferring more explicit "setup" and "teardown" events (bug 55505). We cleaned up the code fixing some outstanding issues violating the coding styles and moved the directory for tests from …/test/… to …/tests/… for consistency with the rest of Wikimedia's repos.

We found and fixed a bug in OOjs which meant the second attempt to disconnect an event would throw an error, which caused some issues in VisualEditor and probably elsewhere (bug 68573), and released a new version, v1.0.11. In OOjs UI, we have added more ARIA-based roles to widgets to improve accessibility (bug 50203). The toolbars now handle touch events directly, rather than through browser translation from click events. The TextInputWidget will now autosize when setValue() is called, not just when a user changes its contents manually. A minor oversight some time ago meant that the tick symbol shown next to menu items in OOUI was missing; we restored this (bug 68170). We also added a special case for the clipping of windows when the "container" is the document body, to prevent odd behaviour (bug 68370).

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 1.24/wmf15 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-07-31 (MW 1.24wmf16)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.24wmf16 branch deployment on Thursday 31 July. In the week since the last deployment, the team worked on the mobile version of VisualEditor for tablet users, fixing a number of bugs, some of which were released early to minimise disruption, and prepared to Wikimania.

From 14 August, tablet users will be able to use VisualEditor on wikis' mobile websites without being in "beta"; the existing wikitext editor will remain the default editor for all wikis for now. The tablet version does not have all of the features of desktop VisualEditor yet, and phones will not get VisualEditor at this point. The icon for comments was switched from a bright orange to a simpler grey, and its display was fixed after a glitch (bug 68721). The version number, which now is shown at the bottom of the help menu, is now wrapped so that it displays correctly for RTL users (bug 68688).

We made an emergency fix to all wikis after finding a bug that meant that once you reviewed the wikitext diff of your changes, VisualEditor ignored any further changes and would shave the page as it had been then (bug 68619). We fixed a critical area of the code which led to number of disruptive bugs causing the insertion of pawn ("♙") and snowmen ("☃") characters when typing after templates with sibling HTML elements, rushed the fix out to all wikis (bugs 67992, 68147, 68151, 68539, 68666, 68733, and 68740).

The "re-use existing reference" dialog had been optimised for performance a little too much so that it never re-built the list of references to insert after the first time it was opened; we corrected this (bug 68869). A related issue meant that the contents of a newly-added reference would show up the first time it was used (bug 67342), and that once you had inserted a re-used reference you couldn't re-insert it (bug 68582). The styling of references' names in the re-use search interface has been tweaked to appear lighter. Finally for this tool, a bug that meant the contents of the re-use reference tool wouldn't show up for basic references unless you had reference list was fixed (bug 68079).

Selecting a comment now looks correct rather than being unselected, and (working around a browser bug) they can now be copy-and-pasted in Firefox. Cursoring off gallery blocks was fixed to work like other nodes like templates, images and references, rather than breaking the display of the cursor. If you edit an "alien" (unrecognised) MediaWiki extension's code we now use the extension's name in the menu, rather than just telling you it's an "Alien". Selection nodes like references, images and templates displayed better in Firefox. We fixed a bug which meant that selecting a link and typing to replace it wouldn't undo correctly (bug 68677).

The language dialog now opens in the correct part of the window stack, which means it now displays correctly (bug 68486), and can be used inside the media and reference ("sub-editor") dialogs (bug 68808). The media search window now will only show the "No results found" message after the results have come back, rather than immediately (bug 67438) and a bug that caused errors in some cases when searching (bug 67749 and related technical debt bug 65321). The toolbar for the caption in the media settings dialog is now only active when the caption is active, rather than starting that way even if you type in the alt text box (bug 68805).

A bug meant that once you opened the page options dialog no further changes would be remembered by VisualEditor until you exited the page was also fixed (bug 68901). We fixed the behaviour when we hide the "breadcrumb" beneath the title on redirect pages restoring correctly when you save the page (bug 68432). Mirroring the wikitext editor, the "Your edit was saved" message now doesn't show if your VisualEditor edit had no changes (a "null edit") because MediaWiki doesn't actually save the page (bug 51243).

On private third-party wikis which lock-down their API in a particular way, searching for an image now works by using a different protocol – this bug did not affect Wikimedia production sites, including private ones, due to different configuration there (bug 64822). The rare warning that there may be corruption from VisualEditor when you save, which had accidentally disappeared a few weeks ago, has been restored. We fixed a bug that meant that a category sortkey containing an underscore ("_") could get corrupted by VisualEditor.

As part of the work to get Mobile ready for release, we fixed a number of issues there. There were a few issues with the positioning of the toolbar and the context (bugs 67390, 67433, 67637, 68198, and 68546). The Agora-like styling of mobile was improved and made to work with the new windowing system in a few more areas (bug 68194). Opening the link editor for the second time in an edit would make the page zoomed, making the editor title overlapped with the browser tab (bug 68197) and scrolling and tapping in the main editor would no longer work (bug 68878).

Some performance and code architecture improvements were made to the system for attaching events to focusable nodes, the document and cursor directionality detection, code for selecting the cursor as the user types, the descriptions of link annotations, and the node resizing code. We removed some unused CSS message and a reference to an old interface message that is no longer used. The interface images were refined to be more compact, and the node resize icons were embedded to work like all the others.

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

2014-08-14 (MW 1.24wmf17)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.24wmf17 branch deployment on Thursday 14 August. In the two weeks since the last deployment, the team worked on some minor bug fixes, whilst all but one of the team attended Wikimania where we also worked with community developers and editors on improvements, areas of concern, and planning for the future.

The biggest bug we fixed was an issue that caused categories to be added twice when you edited them, and would throw errors that could interfere with the operation of the editor (bug 68484). The label to change an image in the media dialog was altered based on translator feedback from "Change image" to "Choose a different image". A couple of the interface messages were also corrected – the welcome "beta" dialog for users on their first use of VisualEditor no longer refers to the "Cancel" button as it has been removed (bug 69201) and the help menu uses the right message to let a user switch to source editing, not the question in the dialog title (bug 69203).

A couple of bugs to do with focussing nodes (items like images, templates or references) were corrected. First, you no longer lose focus from the editor if you delete a node (bug 68708). Secondly, if you use the left or right cursor keys to move the selection from a node we stop the browser from scrolling the view to the top of the document (bug 68589). We corrected an issue that meant links could have links added on top of them. We no longer send useless API requests to preview empty edit summaries.

We fixed the "position" (left/centre/right) button in the advanced pane of the media dialog to not flip the order in right-to-left interfaces like Hebrew or Arabic (bug 69165). Language annotations now use bi-directional isolation so they display correctly with cursoring behaviour as expected. The Mobile version of VisualEditor was tweaked to not show the context menu for basic references but only for citations (bug 68897), and a nasty bug that broke the editor in iOS was corrected and released early (bug 68949).

OOjs UI was updated to correctly initialise the text direction property, and VisualEditor-core now uses karma to provide code test coverage reporting. VisualEditor-MediaWiki was updated in anticipation of using a new API syntax coming soon in MediaWiki 1.24, without needing to bump the version requirement. Undoing the resize of an image in the stand-alone VisualEditor client now shows up correctly at the end (bug 69531).

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

2014-08-21 (MW 1.24wmf18)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.24wmf18 branch deployment on Thursday 21 August. In the week since the last deployment, the team worked on some minor bug fixes.

The buttons to insert a template, reference, reference list, comment, or media item now just say "Insert" rather than "Insert <xyz>" to be simpler, briefer and less repetitive. We changed the label of the window when you are inserting a new template invocation from "New template" to "Add a template" based on translators' feedback (bug 69692). VisualEditor-MediaWiki now puts the mw-redirect or mw-disambig class on links if appropriate in the editing surface, so user gadgets that colour these in types of links can work.

The biggest bug we fixed this week was that pasting into a node (if you had selected an item like an image) with some whitespace would insert the "☀" character as well as your intended paste (bug 69595). Unlike for the rest of the document, typing at the beginning of a document would use the styling of the next character (rather than the previous); this is now corrected to just be un-styled, as users would expect (bug 68597). We fixed a bug that meant putting the cursor direct after a reference list would throw an error (bug 68588). We fixed the tear-down of live extension nodes (like the formula editor) to stop them breaking when you altered them. The media dialog will no longer crash if the API responds with an error.

The dialog that lets you select an existing reference to re-use now is a bit quicker, as it only re-builds the index when you open it if you've changed a reference since the last time it opened (bug 68890). As part of our efforts to make VisualEditor work for users of Internet Explorer as tracked in bug 50085, we fixed a disruptive bug that meant that inspectors would close immediately after opening (bug 69503), and fixed the transplantation code for moving CSS from one document to another when opening <iframe> elements.

VisualEditor-core now embeds its images in the CSS files for the distribution version, and has been re-organised into a more normal directory layout thanks to the internal UnicodeJS library being moved into its own code repository. VisualEditor-core added a new debugging tool, "Filibuster", which scrupulously logs the state of every operation in the stack to help isolate browser-specific behaviour oddities. VisualEditor-MediaWiki was updated to use the new "Config" pattern instead of globals, as introduced in MediaWiki 1.24, which VisualEditor-MediaWiki already depended on.

In OOjs UI, we fixed the formatting of dialogs for Agora users (bug 69710) and the positioning of the button in the toggle control, improved the stylesheet transplantation code, and created a new "combobox" widget. The OOjs library had a new version, 1.0.12, 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 1.24/wmf18 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-08-28 (MW 1.24wmf19)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.24wmf19 branch deployment on Thursday 28 August. In the week since the last deployment, the team worked on several bug fixes and support for the Internet Explorer browser.

You cannot delete templates' fields which are marked as 'required' using TemplateData, when you add a new template or edit and existing one (bug 60358). We tweaked the display of the keyboard shortcut help page which you can launch with Ctrl+? or ⌘ Cmd+? (bug 69643). The context menu that appears when you select an image or a template will now "embed" on top of it again, if it's large enough; this was removed some weeks ago, but we're re-enabling it based on feedback, unless an inspector would be used (such as for formulæ). We also improved the appearance of VisualEditor for Monobook users.

There were two big issues we found that we fixed and released immediately. The first, which meant that many buttons didn't work correctly, was caused by a deployment error (bugs 69856 and 69864). The second was that the save dialog when the user had an edit conflict gave them nowhere to go (bug 69150).

We fixed a bug that caused some of your typing to be undone when you tried to cut a selection using some browsers (bug 58724). The categories suggested when you add a new one will now only cover categories with at least one entry, so former deleted categories won't show up (bug 70025). We took advantage of a change in MediaWiki to make the HTML we render for images simpler and essentially identical to that emitted by Parsoid (bug 66610).

We don't activate the "open" button in the link editor if the link is blank at first (bug 70015). There was an irritating bug that meant in some cases the link target you selected wasn't the one that was inserted. We're now more careful which bits of the page we think are the title to show and hide, as some gadgets could trick our previous code into odd behaviour (bug 69857). A rare bug that could cause minor whitespace changes, and in some unusual cases odd corruption changes to the wikitext (bug 69861).

Thanks to the Language Engineering team, we found and fixed a bug that crashed VisualEditor when trying to edit a page with a dir attribute but no lang set (bug 69955). An improvement to the media dialog fixed an error that could cause border setting to go away when you switched out the image for another (bug 69450).

For mobile tablet users, we fixed three bugs related to scrolling. Firstly, we had an issue where the cursor would jump to the beginning of the page, no matter where the user tapped; this now puts the cursor in the right place, though in some cases iOS will not scroll to the right location until the user starts typing (bug 66697). Secondly, a fix for a related issue from two weeks ago meant that scrolling didn't work when the keyboard was active; this is now possible again (bug 68828). Finally, if you abandon an edit we now correctly tear down the scroll-block so you can scroll the read page on cancelling (bug 69630).

As part of our work on Internet Explorer support, we worked around a browser bug that caused every inspector to close immediately after it was opened, and no longer show a background highlight on content blocks with a language annotation (as an IE bug causes those to not display the text). The OOjs UI library now contains a "" widget, and window managers can be destroyed. VisualEditor-core now has basic support for block images (<figure> / <figcaption>), and the IME simulation suite is now used in the testing framework to ensure we notice when we fix any issues with language support.

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

2014-09-04 (MW 1.24wmf20)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.24wmf20 branch deployment on Thursday 4 September. In the week since the last deployment, the team worked on several bug fixes and support for the Internet Explorer browser.

Internet Explorer 11 users will now get VisualEditor if they want to use it. This means that slightly over 5% of Wikimedia's users will now get an "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, which is about as many people as iPad support released last month. Work to support older versions of Internet Explorer are up next.

We made some fixes for users of the Monobook skin, adjusting the sizes of text in toolbars and selections overlapping menus (bugs 69242, 69263 and 69949). The "group" control for references and reference lists is now a "ComboBox" rather than just a plain text box, so it's quicker to pick one of the existing groups (bug 61574) The warning that wikitext doesn't work will now auto-hide the first time you trigger it, and not require you to dismiss it manually (bug 70168). The save dialog's edit summary text box has been shrunk slightly, as it was too tall, misleading users into writing overly-long summaries.

Menus now open to the right instead of the left if there's not enough room, which means the page options menu (opened by pressing on the "" icon) now doesn't get cut off by the edge of the browser window (bug 57366). Creating a link in a blank line now won't show a selection back to the line before (bug 69122). When you undo an operation we now track and restore the selection correctly for all changes, not just most (bugs 68762 and 70175).

The "open" button won't be enabled in the link editor if there isn't a target yet (bug 70015). Using the special character inserter, new characters will follow on from the styling of the content into which they're inserted (bug 60476). VisualEditor now remembers what links were suggested when you use the link editor to remember what pages do and don't exist to make them redlinks. The command help dialog, listing the keyboard shortcuts, now won't grow unreasonably tall.

We fixed a bug where you tried to insert a link that was invalid, stopping the editor from undoing the change twice and accidentally undoing others actions as well (bug 70167). VisualEditor will now use the summary GET parameter if specified to populate the edit summary, as expected by a few gadgets (bug 69501). We improved the error messages that are displayed when the server is broken in some way, which will help with debugging for Wikimedia and particularly third party users (bugs 43147 and 63149). Some of the early, preparatory work for real-time collaboration landed, improving the transaction system when meta-data items like categories and magic words are removed.

The OOjs UI library was improved with a new system for providing themes, as part of work to provide a new MediaWiki theme in line with Design's plans; the old "Agora" theme was renamed to "Minerva" (as that was the style it was actually targeting). The OOjs library had a new version, 1.1.0, released, which OOjs UI, VisualEditor and MediaWiki all now use, and which will provide a drop-in replacement for the Mantle extension's EventEmitter 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 1.24/wmf20 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

2014-09-11 (MW 1.24wmf21)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.24wmf21 branch deployment on Thursday 11 September. In the week since the last deployment, the team worked on some minor feature improvements, several bug fixes, and further browser support for Internet Explorer.

If you create a new link to an external source, as opposed to adding a link to some existing text, we will now create an auto-numbered link for you (bug 51309); these can be converted to normal links with one click. The "re-use" option in the Cite menu, and the "re-use an existing reference" button in the reference dialog, now are disabled until there is a reference on the page, rather than showing a confusing blank list of references to insert (bugs 70611 and 70640). We added long-form help descriptions to each of the controls in the first pane of the page settings dialog, so that users can find out what each of the buttons does (bug 51798).

We fixed and released immediately an issue in the version of VisualEditor shown to tablet users, where the toolbar showed up as squished together, due to a core change in the UX that we hadn't adjusted on mobile (bug 70430). We also released immediately a regression where some pop-up windows would show at half width in some circumstances (bug 70565) and another that meant the template dialog had stopped showing the names of each of its fields (bug 70406).

We fixed an issue in MediaWiki that would make it so that sometimes you couldn't click all of the save page button in VisualEditor's toolbar (bug 70602). The media dialog had a few minor bugs that we fixed – the "No results found" message now doesn't appear unless there are actually no results found, even if you're using Firefox (bug 67438); undoing an edit to the caption now doesn't cause the dialog to suggest changes to be made if there aren't any (bug 68058); and pressing the button to resize the media item to default size works after you've manually set the size to a custom value (bug 68000).

In VisualEditor-core, we removed the last uses of the "rangy" library, whose development had retrenched from the features we were using of it and was not up to date with how the latest browsers' JavaScript engines work (bug 68492). We fixed a potential bug in the code that cleans up content when you "paste unformatted" (Ctrl+⇧ Shift+V). VisualEditor in MediaWiki now gives an error to system administrators if it cannot find some of its files on start-up, rather than failing silently.

The OOjs UI library was modified to work better in Internet Explorer 10, as part of our continuing work to expand VisualEditor's browser support; Internet Explorer 10 compatibility should be coming soon. The library now also converts its SVG icons into PNG automatically, in preparation for dynamically generating different coloured versions of the icons for different use cases. The OOjs library had a new version released, 1.1.1, which OOjs UI, VisualEditor and MediaWiki all now use, after we discovered an issue with the oo.compare function not covering boolean primitives, causing bug 70575 in VisualEditor.

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

2014-09-18 (MW 1.24wmf22)

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.24wmf22 branch deployment on Thursday 18 September. In the week since the last deployment, the team worked on some minor feature improvements, and several major bug fixes.

The template editor now warns you about missing required fields when inserting or editing a template, including citations (bug 50747). The save dialog's "Cancel" button is now labelled "Resume editing" as some users worried that the button might end the edit session and throw away their changes (bug 69116). We added keyboard shortcuts for marking some text as "strikethrough" – Ctrl+⇧ Shift+5/⌘ Cmd+⇧ Shift+5 (bug 60257) – and as "code" – Ctrl+⇧ Shift+6/⌘ Cmd+⇧ Shift+6 (bug 52597). When you switch to source mode, we now show a pending state so that it's clear something is happening (bug 65012).

We fixed a few bugs for immediate release. We found a case where an error was thrown (bugs 70770 and 70782), which also caused the toolbar to not be destroyed when you left the editor (bug 70768). There was a bug that meant inserting a template which had multiple parts would crash the editor and insert multiple snowmen ("☃") characters (bug 70777). We worked around a bad bug in Internet Explorer that caused style and bgcolor attributes to be normalised when you edited a page (bug 70856). Unfortunately this uncovered an even worse bug in Firefox that would change any category link with an accent or non-Latin character in it into a link to MediaWiki:Badtitletext, and any link would have its spaces replaced by underscores (bug 70897). These were all fixed and released immediately, and we apologise again for the disruption.

The template editor was mis-counting the number of available fields left to add, which we corrected (bug 70609). If you click and drag and move the pointer out of the document, we now keep track of the mouse until you unclick (bug 59822). We worked around a corruption caused by Windows's native clipboard adding HTML comments when using Chrome (bug 70799). We re-wrote an old piece of code that stopped you from adding a new paragraph at the end of a page if the existing last line was an empty section heading (bug 59652). The cite menu's options now are disabled when user clicks outside the document, rather than staying enabled (bug 70870).

We corrected a problem that caused issues for users of Safari in most dialogs (bug 70578). Inserting a link will now keep the bold, italics and related styling of the content around it (bug 70534). We found and fixed an issue where if you pasted in content with an "auto" direction and no language attribute, like a MediaWiki page title, editing it with the language editor would cause a crash (bug 70731). We also fixed an issue where if you selected the link inspector after inserting a link by selection a formula or other node, you would get the link added as text in the editor (bug 60843).

VisualEditor now keeps track of pages that it has found out exists due to link, template or category searches so it can more efficiently show red links when needed (bug 69886). The OOjs UI library was improved with a number of fixes. Popup items now position themselves correctly when the dimensions change, and help popups now appear floated to the right of the FieldLayout to which they refer, rather than inline. Pending statuses are now brought together into a PendingElement mixin. TextInputMenuWidget items now update their width before the labels are fitted into it, which fixed a bug where labels would be truncated initially even though there was enough space, and then be displayed in full when you typed a second character. Dialogs' size is now calculated and set correctly when transitioning between windows and states (bug 70016).

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 1.24/wmf22 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.