Hello all,

As before, the regular update about progress on the VisualEditor (these are now weekly):

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf6 branch deployment on Thursday 6 June. In the ten days weeks since 1.22wmf5, the team worked on new features ahead of VisualEditor's launch as the default way users will edit our wikis in beta.

The most noticeable change for users is that it is now possible to set, edit and remove the categories that a page belongs to and it's "default sort" key, as part of the new "page settings" dialog that can be opened from the button on the toolbar. For now, this dialog covers categories and a simple listing of language links, but will be expanded to cover other "meta-data" like a page having the table of contents disabled, and integration with Wikidata's language links system. Work also continued on the other three critical areas ahead of the release - Templates, References and Images - and we hope to release these in the next week or two.

The way that known browsers are supported changed slightly; browsers are now only blacklisted if we know that they cause significant problems, like Internet Explorer version 8 and below. If your browser is not known, you will get a notice alerting you to this issue (38128). We have added further support in our back-end for multi-character "grapheme clusters", which means that wikis that use extended ("non-BMP") Unicode characters can now work (48975). The left and right arrow keys now move in the correct direction in RTL environments (38546).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf6 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period on Bugzilla's list.


​If you have any questions, please do ask.​

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

jforrester@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester