Hello all,

As before, the regular updatehttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/status#2013-05-13_.28MW_1.22wmf4.29 about progress on the VisualEditor:

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf4 branch deployment https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/wmf4 on Monday 13 May. In the two weeks since 1.22wmf3, the team have worked on the new features for VisualEditor's beta launch as the default way users will edit our wikis: Categories, Templates, References and Images.

The VisualEditor now lets users edit the contents of <div> blocks (47907https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47907) as if they were normal mark-up - though not the blocks themselves, such as setting arbitrary CSS, which will come later. Work on enabling the editing of categories is almost finished with the addition of a way of setting {{DEFAULTSORT}} in the interface (46465https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46465), and support for moving, altering and inserting new images and references is also improving rapidly. Progress on template editing is at an earlier stage, with core back-end support mostly finished at this point.

We made quite a few changes to the MediaWiki integration layer. Most obviously, we now use SVGs rather than PNGs for the graphical elements of the interface, so it scales nicely for users who zoom in (48148https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48148). The "Edit source" tab now appropriate becomes active when it is being used ( 47452 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47452), appears on all pages, not just view (47776https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47776), and the "Edit" (VE) tab now points to the newly-updated page once you've made an edit (47420 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47420). The Vector drop-down menu's change behaviour no longer hides it behind the VisualEditor toolbar (48078https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48078 )

We improved some issues with the Opera browser (47772https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47772) and now warn logged-out users appropriately about the consequences of their editing (47842 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47842). Pre-save diffs now give a more reasonable message when there are no changes to be made (43754 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43754), and now work when the diff is aborted and restarted (44446https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44446). Pages that are not wikitext content (such as user CSS or JS items) will now not trigger VisualEditor (47456https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47456). We added a new access key for accessing VisualEditor - Ctrl+Alt+v/Ctrl+⌥ Option+v - restoring the regular edit access key to the wikitext editor ( 48107 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48107).

We also made a number of fixes for RTL environments. First, the link inspector now works for RTL environments, but allows LTR content for Web links (47717 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47717). For multi-script variant wikis, content displayed with one variant whilst the user's interface is in a second now works correctly (33175https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33175). Un-editable blocks ("aliens") now appear in RTL environments correctly ( 47746 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47746). Finally, the "Edit" (VE) tab now appears down-tab rather than up-tab of the "Edit Source" tab (48017 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48017).

On the integration with Parsoid, we cleaned up a number of items of code including removing change markers (45061https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45061), and fixed some problems with trailing whitespace on paragraphs and table cells being dropped (47712https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47712). Content with different names for the same annotation now serialises to the same wikitext (48110 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48110), and serialisation of data with DOM elements is now fixed (47948https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47948 ).

Finally, we fixed a number of other bugs, including ugly issues with pawn characters being created in list and paragraph editing (48287https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48287 , 48286 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48286, 47817https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47817, and 48346 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48346), with indenting and outdenting of multiple list items (48390https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48390), and with splitting list items (48386https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48386). Categories that appear in sub-sub-pages don't get corrupted when the page is being edited (48408https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48408), and in Firefox, we fixed editing a page causing the entire editor to go blank (47834 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47834) and non-character keys being interpreted as real ones (48022https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48022). Trying to set a link covering the first character of the document no longer causes VisualEditor to crash (47623https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47623), and links now don't wrongly appear to extend when you type after them (48171https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48171 and 48114 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48114).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf4 changeloghttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/wmf4/Changelog#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-2013-05-13&product=VisualEditor&list_id=201511 .

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,