User blog:Sarah Manley/New Editor Scheduled for Sitewide Release

Over the past few months, we've been working to improve the editing experience on Wikia by redesigning the skin of the edit page. After lots of bug spotting, fixing and tweaking, we are excited to announce that it is now ready for further rollout across Wikia. On Wednesday, August 31, the new editor skin will be released on all wikis.

We want to offer a big thanks for all of your bug reports. During this development process your reports helped us identify lots of edge cases, especially specialized messages and unique wiki setups, browser issues (yes we so love IE), as well as other tweaks. It is important to note that this release is not the end of development on the editor, and we will continue to list the major bug fixes and tweaks on the weekly technical update as they are identified and fixed.

As we continue to develop the editor, we are still considering many other suggestions, such as further updated category module (initial improvements coming on wednesday), improved notifications, and dark wiki tweaks. Next we will be improving loading speed along with investigating a visual mode spell checker!

Thanks again for all your great feedback — and please continue to provide further suggestions (and any bug reports) below.

Update - August 30, 2011
Quick update on a few things we are currently investigating. These bugs will likely not be fixed before tomorrow’s release but we are actively working on them.
 * Opening links in a new tab with Ctrl+click from preview does not work. However, using the right-click context menu does work as expected and can be used while we resolve this.
 * Custom CSS backgrounds that use the body tag will pull the image into the editing window (which can make it tricky to see your edits). If you use this tag in your custom CSS, please adjust it to body.mediawiki, so it stays just on the background. Backgrounds set via the Theme Designer are not affected.

For tomorrow’s sitewide release we will also be pushing the following bug fixes:


 * Removal of the extra scrollbar that appeared when editing with visual mode switched off.


 * Chrome users will no longer see the annoying ‘paste’ dialog in the visual editor - we are trying a different method of fixing the core issue that is far less, well, annoying.