Hello all,

As before, the regular update about progress on the VisualEditor:

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf5 branch deployment on Monday 27 May. In the two weeks since 1.22wmf4, the team attended the Wikimania Hackathon in Amsterdam, working with the community to improve VisualEditor and help them, and, ahead of VisualEditor's launch as the default way users will edit our wikis in beta, worked on the new features: Categories, Templates, References and Images.

In terms of improvements to the integration with MediaWiki, we have a number of changes. When the diff result is null because we think you've made no changes, we say so rather than give a confusing blank diff table (43754); wikitext edit conflict handling is now integrated into the save dialog rather than punting you out of VisualEditor (42522); minor edit checkboxes get pre-set (48347), and you get a warning about not having set an edit summary (47752), based on your preferences; when editing old revisions, you are now warned about this (47683); we now show "Editing …" in the browser title when in VisualEditor, like for the wikitext editor, so that it's clear which of your tabs is editing (48272).

We give a better error message if Parsoid is unavailable during diffs (47581). If the edit token we're using is detected as invalid, we ask for a new one (42984). The edit summary field correctly counts the number of characters entered when using non-ASCII characters (47718). The <visualeditor-feedback-link> message is now shown in the content language, rather than the user language (47730). We now won't load for pages which are redirects as they can't yet be edited (47329). We show "create source" rather than "edit source" for the wikitext editor tab for non-existent pages (47421). We don't disable the save dialog when editing a prior revision (48584). Pre-formatted text blocks now word-wrap rather than character-wrap (38043).

Auto-selection expansion now behaves at the ends of paragraphs as elsewhere (48487), and the link inspector now understands that the first characters of links being auto-capitalised based on wiki context doesn't make them different links (48476). The toolbar clears floated items to avoid mis-alignment (48734). VisualEditor should now work with non-BMP Unicode characters (48630). Finally, we fixed a couple of breaks in the link inspector button (48509 and 48549), in pasting text (48602 and 48603), and some problems when moving back to read mode whilst VisualEditor was loading (48520 and 47813).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf5 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period on Bugzilla's list.


As always, I would be very grateful if you could highlight any parts of the update that you think important for your local wikis. ​If you have any questions, please do ask.​

​Yours,
-- 
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforrester@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester