User blog:Ducksoup/Visual Editor Gets an Update

Gooooood morning Wikiaaaaa!

Ducksoup, checking in. Today - and for about a week - we're slowly rolling out updates to VisualEditor, trying to give as many Wikians as possible the chance to create, collaborate, and be original. And we're doing that by upgrading VisualEditor’s performance and introducing some really cool new features.

Our biggest change - which will roll out locally in a week, around March 25th - is support for IME. Now our Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Japanese communities will have access to VisualEditor. I know a couple of my international colleagues on the community team have given it a spin and really enjoyed the experience. It should be seamless and intuitive - if you're fluent in any of those languages, give it a shot when it gets enabled in your language, and let us know what you think in the comments.

Another change that makes VE significantly more powerful: several Wikitext tags are now enabled! You can see the user flow just by typing [[ when you're typing in a VisualEditor window. If you're accustomed to another editor, it might take a bit to get a feel for it, but you'll thank yourself for the effort. This change gives you the power of wikitext with the instant feedback of a live preview.



Finally, we've also given VisualEditor full access to the table tools. This change, too, is remarkably intuitive and actually pretty fun to fool around with. Wikians love their tables, so we're hoping this puts one of your favorite tools in closer reach.



We are slowly rolling these changes out because we hope to catch bugs and issues as we go. Along with those feature additions, we also added some very significant performance upgrades (we tested it internally; it’s blazing quick now) as well as some big bug fixes, most notably cleaning up a bunch of dirty diffs and an odd RSS breakage. All these features came from the VisualEditor team at the MediaWiki Foundation with some significant integration work performed by our great engineers and QA folks here at Wikia. And of course, leave your questions and comments below!