Templates have always been the biggest weakness of the VisualEditor, but no decent wiki uses the simple templates that all the iterations of the VisualEditor support without going to Source mode.
Templates have always been the biggest weakness of the VisualEditor, but no decent wiki uses the simple templates that all the iterations of the VisualEditor support without going to Source mode.
TemplateData sounds like a good idea, what alot of work!
The new editor lets you adjust the content in infoboxes without going into source mode. It's a litte better than the older visual editor, where the same template forced source mode. There also were weird exceptions to force source (e..g. back to back comments "-->
I'll be the first to admit that the Template tool inside the VisualEditor isn't up to snuff. MediaWiki templates in general are hard to support in a CMS due to their complexity but that's no exuse — we can (and will) do better.There are a couple of improvements that will be made the the Template tool in the new year, both from the Wikimedia Foundation and from Wikia.
The current tool is a bit cumbersome to navigate around and creates a lot of hoops for users to jump through, even if they just want to modify one single parameter. Adding a new template to an article is even more difficult.
Wikia will look into TemplateData in the new year as one solution to this. Another will be to shape some "best template practices" with experienced contributors like you to provide a great template experience in the VE.
In the meantime, I would greatly appreciate it if you can provide specific examples of how users are failing with the template tool. Are users deleting parameters on accident? Typing in the wrong parameter fields? Inserting templates where they don't belong? This feedback will help us focus on the biggest problems to solve first.
If the old RTE could support the TemplateData, why would it be difficult for the new RTE? I think people generally fail on inputting numbered parameters like {{{1|}}}
I can't risk turning on the new VE in WoWWiki, so I may do it on WoWRP to do more testing, since it has more complex templates than many wikis, but less than the really big ones. So far I have not been able to identify wikis were I admin that I can turn on the new VE AND have sufficiently complex templates to make template testing worthwhile.
It would be nice to have clearer criteria about when you will get the Source editor only situation on templates. That way we could try to avoid using whatever cause that and get more VE friendly templates. From my perspective, the VE is mostly a black box.
I would like it if the template editor showed parameters in order they appear in the template (rather than alpha order). Right now, i'm having users input templates at found on the template page into source mode with all parameters written out, then editting the parameters visually.
Even better, if areas that are edittable through parameters be highlighted in visual editor, and then editable straight from there (rather than listing all parameters in a set).
Still waiting for the table editting tools. :/