User blog:Rappy/Technical Update: September 7, 2015

Here are the latest technical updates at Wikia. Keep in mind that our system updates happen every Tuesday and Thursday - today's notes are for tomorrow's site update. Also note that we change hundreds of tiny details every week, so these are just the highlights.

We hope those of you in the USA (including our colleagues) are enjoying your Labor Day weekend! Life goes on as normal elsewhere, so here are tomorrow's release notes.

New Feature

 * Updated login and registration forms will be enabled on Community Central (and most of its international counterparts). Update: The new forms will likely be enabled tomorrow (Wednesday, September 9) on Community Centrals.
 * An updated version of the Community App curation tool will become available. This allows admins of any community (even those that don't have a Community App) to curate a mobile-friendly main page layout. The tool itself can be used on smartphones as well, and is accessible to admins via a new button at the top of the main page. Read more in a blog post coming this week! Update: The updated curation tool is in a limited release now and will be widely available with Thursday's release.

Major Bug Fixes

 * We believe we have spotted the source of the weekend's Chat issues, and it should now be getting back to normal.

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.


 * We are preparing to beta test tools that will allow community JavaScript pages (e.g. Common.js and Wikia.js) to be edited again.
 * Please be aware that the beta test will be very limited, but will hopefully be fairly short.
 * We know you're eager to learn more - we'll post lots more details about how this will work tomorrow. Stay tuned! Update: details are live at Help:JavaScript review process!
 * As part of the above change, MediaWiki namespace pages ending in ".js" will no longer be usable in Verbatim tags. Let us know if this causes an issue for your community.
 * Additionally, current editing restrictions on MediaWiki talk pages that end in .js will be lifted (other MediaWiki talk pages are already editable).
 * Several pages will be added to the MediaWiki namespace whitelist (and we are still working on more):
 * Categoryblacklist, Communitymessages-notice-msg, Copyrightwarning, Editor-template-list, Moveddeleted-notice, Newarticletext, Noarticletext, Talkpagetext
 * Last week, logged-in users began to see an updated mobile web layout for articles. There are also significant changes to how the mobile site is served; it now functions as a "single-page app", meaning that only the new elements needed for subsequent page views are loaded. Static elements (like navigation) don't need to reload. For those more curious about the details, we’re using Ember with a NodeJS back end.
 * We are currently rebuilding the mobile version of the editor to work with the new serving methods, so currently editing of articles is only available in "Full Site" mode.
 * Commenting on mobile will also be unavailable for a while, but can still be accessed by viewing the full site.
 * The classic editor's mobile preview will be updated soon. The URL parameter ?useskin=wikiamobile will display the new design for articles while still showing the older design for other types of pages.
 * Portable Infoboxes will no longer try to parse the  inequality operand, error on a   tag (expecting a   tag instead), or automatically truncate empty   tags into.

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