User talk:Benzband/Archives/December 2014

VisualEditor newsletter—December 2014


Did you know?

Basic table editing is now available in VisualEditor. You can add and remove rows and columns from existing tables at the click of a button.

The user guide has more information about how to use VisualEditor. Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on table editing and performance. Their weekly status reports are posted on Mediawiki.org. Upcoming plans are posted at the VisualEditor roadmap.

VisualEditor was deployed to several hundred remaining wikis as an opt-in beta feature at the end of November, except for most Wiktionaries (which depend heavily upon templates) and all Wikisources (which await integration with ProofreadPage).

Recent improvements
Basic support for editing tables is available. You can insert new tables, add and remove rows and columns, set or remove a caption for a table, and merge cells together. To change the contents of a cell, double-click inside it. More features will be added in the coming months. In addition, VisualEditor now ignores broken, invalid  and   elements, instead of trying to repair them.

You can now use find and replace in VisualEditor, reachable through the tool menu or by pressing ⌃ Ctrl + F or ⌘ Cmd + F.

You can now create and edit simple  paragraphs for quoting and indenting content. This changes a "" into a "".

Some new keyboard sequences can be used to format content. At the start of the line, typing " * " will make the line a bullet list; " 1. " or " # " will make it a numbered list; " == " will make it a section heading; " : " will make it a blockquote. If you didn't mean to use these tools, you can press undo to undo the formatting change. There are also two other keyboard sequences: " [[ " for opening the link tool, and " {{ " for opening the template tool, to help experienced editors. The existing standard keyboard shortcuts, like ⌃ Ctrl + K to open the link editor, still work.

If you add a category that has been redirected, then VisualEditor now adds its target. Categories without description pages show up as red.

You can again create and edit galleries as wikitext code.

Looking ahead
VisualEditor will replace the existing design with a new theme designed by the User Experience group. The new theme will be visible for desktop systems at MediaWiki.org in late December and at other sites early January. (You can see a developer preview of the old "Apex" theme and the new "MediaWiki" one which will replace it.)

The Editing team plans to add auto-fill features for citations in January. Planned changes to the media search dialog will make choosing between possible images easier.

Help
If you would like to help with translations of this newsletter, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Meta.
 * Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
 * Translations of the user guide for most languages are oudated. Ukrainian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Dutch translators are nearly current. Please help complete the current translations for users who speak your language.
 * Talk to the Editing team during the office hours via IRC. The next session is on Wednesday, 7 January 2015 at 22:00 UTC.
 * File requests for language-appropriate "" and "" icons for the character formatting menu in Phabricator.
 * The design research team wants to see how real editors work. Please sign up for their research program.

Thank you! WhatamIdoing (WMF) (talk) 23:37, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

Still want your name on Teahouse invites?
Hi Benzband! A while back, you agreed to have your name attached to some of the daily Teahouse invites sent by HostBot. Are you still interested in having your name included in some of these invites? If not, I'm happy to remove your name from the list. Cheers, - J-Mo Talk to Me Email Me  00:15, 29 December 2014 (
 * }


 * Hi Jtmorgan! It's been a while since I've been active at the Teahouse, so indeed it probably doesn't make sense for me to figure on invitations anymore. Happy New Year, benzband  ( talk ) 23:04, 1 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Cool! I've taken your name off the list for now. Ping me if you ever want back on. Happy new year to you as well! Cheers, - J-Mo Talk to Me Email Me  20:02, 2 January 2015 (UTC)