Hello all,

As before, the regular updatehttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/status#2013-02-04_.28MW_1.21wmf9.29about progress on the VisualEditor:

The VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.21wmf9 branch deployment https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.21/wmf9 on Monday 4 February.

In the two-and-a-half weeks since 1.21wmf9, the team have continued planning for the next tranche of work, and working on the core changes that will be needed in preparation for this. For the end of 2012/13, in line with the strategic goals for the VisualEditor set out in the 2012/13 planhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2012-13_Goals#Visual_Editor, we are looking to provide VE as the 'default' editor for all users, capable of letting them edit the majority of content without needing to use the wikitext editor. This means adding support for at least basic templates, references, categories and images, each of which is a very large piece of work.

The initial focus has included a major expansion in the capabilities of the 'document model' module that converts between the HTML+RDFa rendered by Parsoid https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid and an editable document. Other areas of work have covered editability of images in the "ContentEditable" editing surface, refactoring the keyboard short-cut command triggering system, and improving the documentation system used so that the code is easier to extend.

A small number of changes have made it into the codebase for this release, most notably adding support for Microsoft Internet Explorer v. 9 and above ( 42847 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42847), adding hints of what keyboard short-cuts are available to each button (42919https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42919), which can now vary more easily by platform (44012https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44012), and internationalisation support for toolbar icons (38551https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38551 ).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.21/wmf9 changelog https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.21/wmf9#VisualEditor, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period on Bugzilla's listhttps://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&bug_status=RESOLVED&bug_status=VERIFIED&bug_status=CLOSED&target_milestone=VE-deploy-2013-02-04&product=VisualEditor&list_id=177780 .

If you have any questions, please do ask.

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

jforrester@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester