Forum:Will RTE facelift changes make a difference?

Please read User blog:Sarah Manley/A Facelift for the Edit Page before responding.

I'm going to go through the announced changes and comment on whether I think they will really help. This is just my opinion, but I'd like to hear what other people think.

This may be a nice change, but unless there are some new or improved tools, this may be mostly moving the deck chairs around. Again, nice to have, but doesn't significantly improve the functionality of the RTE. This would be way more helpful, if you could edit templates or inside HTML tags. Since you can't, this is also mostly a cosmetic improvement. I'll have to see this before I can comment. This would be a good change for the source editor, but doesn't help much for the RTE.
 * Expanded tool space. To date, we’ve left the right rail of the editing page empty, and now we are ready to use that space. We've spread out the tools, so everything you need is now in easy reach. Your editing space has also moved up the page, keeping all the important parts of the edit page right where you can see them.
 * Custom view tool menu. With expandable areas for each tool set, you can click to view or hide tools, depending on your preference.
 * Preview and publish. The Publish button and Edit Summary have moved up the page so that they are always in easy reach. You can also see the page preview in a lightbox so there is no need for a page reload. If you like what you see, you can now publish directly from the lightbox.
 * One less scroll bar. One of the problems with the current editor is that is has two scroll bars -- which can make it difficult to navigate around the page. The new editor only has one scroll bar.

In general all these changes, while nice, are almost purely cosmetic and don't address any of the many real problems the RTE has.

My rating: Meh. -- Fandyllic (talk &middot; contr) 15 Apr 2011 12:04 PM Pacific


 * I'm happy with the fact the Wikia has at least noticed that the RTE, in it's current state, is virtually unusable. Maybe after the cosmetic changes, functionality changes will follow. It can't get much worse than it currently is, so I look forward to see the changes, which are hard to discuss before we can actually see and test them out. I just hope I won't have to view another RTE window which uses the wiki's background as it's own again ;) Sovq 20:23, April 15, 2011 (UTC)