User blog:Sarah Manley/Try the New Wikia Editor

Over the past couple of months, we have been working to re-design the Wikia editing interface. I am happy to announce that as of today, the revamped editor is available for testing in Wikia Labs. Wikia Labs is located on every wiki at Special:WikiaLabs (more info). If you are an admin, you now have the option to test the editor on your wiki. If you are not an admin, you can test the new editor on the Community Test or the Wikia Labs wikis.

What has changed
We've reworked the layout and design of the editor from the ground up, so there are many changes across the board, including improvements to both the visual and source mode editing. The main changes you will see are:


 * The media features have been moved from the top toolbar to the right rail. Note: Unless you are on the main page, which has no right rail.
 * The feature list is expandable &mdash; you can see more or less depending on your needs.
 * We now have only one scrollbar on the page in the edit window.
 * Messages (such as warnings, notices, license text, etc.) have been updated and moved to more obvious and consistent locations. Note: We are still working on some tweaks to these.
 * We have removed the 'unlink' toolbar button — you can still undo a link by using the right-click context menu.

What hasn't changed

 * The functionality of the editor itself has not changed.
 * Source mode still works the same (but uses the new design), and the preference to disable visual mode is still respected.
 * You can still switch to widescreen mode in source mode.
 * If your wiki uses preloads, they will not be impacted.
 * This update does not affect Monobook users.

Future development plans
This is just our first iteration of the new editing experience. Here are a few areas we are focussing on next:


 * Faster loading
 * Spellchecking in visual mode
 * Better interaction design: fewer source mode fallbacks, fewer green 'puzzle pieces', more drag-to-resize functionality, etc.
 * Your requests!

What we would love to hear about
Please use the feedback tool in Wikia Labs to let us know about:


 * General edit page bugs
 * Browser failures (e.g. feature X is broken, on browser Y in situation Z)
 * Missing important features (or something exists but took a very long time to find)
 * Confusing experiences

Thanks in advance to those that test and provide feedback. We will be releasing the editor in a series of stages across Wikia over the next month. Stay tuned to the staff blog for further announcements.