User blog:Kirkburn/Technical Update: March 25, 2015

Here are the latest technical updates at Wikia! As usual, please note that we change hundreds of tiny details every week, so these are just the highlights.

As mentioned in last week's notes, we are beginning a trial period of releasing twice per week, on Tuesday and Thursday. The benefits of making this change are that updates get released faster, and individual releases are smaller and more manageable. This week, we are posting this single technical update blog, containing details of yesterday's and tomorrow's releases.

In the future, when needed, the technical update will include a 'Looking Ahead' section to give details of high-profile changes expected the following week. As readers of the technical update blogs, we welcome your feedback as we move through this trial period.

New Features

 * Thursday
 * Syntax highlighting is going global! We will be releasing the feature to all communities across Wikia, in the classic editor. If you spot any issues with it (or have any general feedback), please do let us know.
 * If you wish to turn off wikitext highlighting, you can find a preference on the 'Editing' tab: "Do not show syntax highlighting in Source mode".

Major Bugs Fixed

 * Thursday
 * Replacing a video will no longer incorrectly convert it into a static image.
 * The classic editor's mobile preview will no longer show multiple scrollbars on shorter screens.


 * Tuesday
 * Syntax highlighting has received another round of tasty bug fixes, including:
 * Some light theme wikias using dark theming
 * Highlighted wikitext line-spacing too low
 * Slow performance and/or missing highlighting on long pages
 * Wikia Maps error messaging has been improved during creation of map pins.
 * An issue preventing database downloads from working well on very large communities has been fixed.
 * Deleting an article with comments no longer shows a banner notification about comment deletion, rather than the intended article deletion notice.


 * Other
 * Some old-school images included double slashes ("//") in their URL - we have added a bit of code to ensure links using these URLs point to the correct location. Groovy baby! This went live on Monday.

Other Notable Changes
Detailed CSS updates can be found at http://report.wikia.net - the diffs show changes to .css, .scss, .tmpl.php, .html, .sass and .mustache files in Wikia's codebase.


 * Tuesday
 * The Hero Image beta test has received some more visual updates, reducing information duplication.


 * Other
 * The updated VisualEditor has been rolling out to the majority of communities over the past few days - adding some helpful new features, improving performance, and fixing a variety of irksome bugs.

Questions? Comments? Feel free to leave them below. And if you have additional bugs to report, please send them to us via Special:Contact.