Help:VisualEditor

Beta

The VisualEditor feature allows users to edit an article quickly and easily. The editing interface will always reflect how the article will look when published. Read more about Wikia's beta release of VisualEditor on the Staff Blog.

Using VisualEditor
On the Community Test Wikia or another Wikia site taking part in the Beta release, the "Edit" button on an article page will start VisualEditor. Unlike the current Wikia editor, VisualEditor does not reload the entire page in your browser. The transition to edit mode is quick – the editing toolbar simply appears at the top of the article space, and the cursor appears at the beginning of the text.

Making an edit
After clicking "Edit", simply begin typing the text that you want to add. The toolbar allows for basic text modification like bold, italic and the selection of various text sizes (headings and sub-headings).

Your browser's native spell check function will be used as you enter text; this is most often shown as red underlining on misspelled words.

The toolbar also has the link tool that's used to link words or phrases to other pages on the same Wikia site. Highlight the text and click the link button. In the dialog that appears, enter the target of the link. For an internal link, start typing the name of the page (see Types of Internal Links for more details). For an external link, enter the full URL (including the "http://" part). When you're done, simply hit enter or click elsewhere on the screen to dismiss the dialog. Click the linked text to access the dialog again for further changes.

Choose one of the list icons to start a numbered or bulleted list.

The toolbar's "More" menu has additional buttons for underline and strikethrough formatting, subscript, superscript and indentation controls.

Other modifications

 * Add a new template using the VE-TransclusionIcon.pngclusion option on the Toolbar's "More" menu.
 * Edit an existing template by selecting it and using the transclusion icon in the upper right.
 * Edit categories by clicking the Page Settings button in the toolbar: [[File:VE-PageSettingsButton.png]]
 * Add references by choosing the VE-ReferenceIcon.pngences option on the More menu in the toolbar.
 * Edit existing references by selecting the references section and clicking the references icon in the upper right.

Media (images and videos)

 * Resize and move images already present in the article by selecting the image and using your mouse.


 * Edit image captions by selecting an image and clicking the image icon VE-MediaIcon.png at the upper right.


 * Upload and insertion of media is not yet supported.

Notes about the Beta release
Try out VisualEditor on the Community Test Wikia.

VisualEditor is not supported in Internet Explorer at this time. Other standard browsers are supported.

The current release allows for editing of article text, image captions, templates, categories and references. Any element that you can't modify using VisualEditor will be obscured with a striped overlay and a tooltip stating that it's not editable. To do things like uploading or inserting images/videos, and creating new templates or tables, you'll still need to use the "classic" Wikia editing experience. Wikia will be adding more functionality soon, and the VisualEditor is only active for the main namespace at this time. VisualEditor is only available in the Wikia skin.

To access the current Wikia editor, use the "Classic editor" option on the "Edit" dropdown menu. It works just as normal, with the "source" and "visual" tabs (and if you have visual editing disabled in your user preferences, you'll only see the source option in the Classic editor, as before).

We hope that you'll enjoy experimenting with this new feature. However, if you'd like to disable it in your own preferences, you can do so using the Beta Preferences section on Special:Preferences. This section of your Preferences will only be visible on the Community Test Wikia or another community involved in the Beta release.

Further help and feedback

 * For help using the standard Wikia editor, please see Help:Editing