On 29 January 2016 at 12:22, Daniel Barrett <danb(a)cimpress.com> wrote:
Within the next few weeks, I'll be deploying
VisualEditor for 1000+
authors here at Cimpress/Vistaprint, in a wiki with 225,000 articles.
Hey Daniel,
Best of luck with the deploy!
I plan to collect feedback from our users on what works and what doesn't.
What would be the best way to communicate this
feedback to Wikimedia?
Broadly, feedback about the features (bugs, confusion, design suggestions,
feature requests, enhancements, *etc.*) should go on
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Feedback (though most people
there are talking about Wikimedia wikis, as you might imagine).
You can also give ideas directly onto Phabricator at
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/create/?projects=VisualEdi…
if
that's of interest.
Feedback about the software (difficulties configuring it, *etc.*) generally
go on
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_talk:VisualEditor as other
sysadmins read there for advice, problem solving and recommendation sharing.
Here are some early, informal comments from our pilot
group of 20 users:
"I am in love!"
Thank you. The team have done a great job, and it's great to hear people
are happy. :-)
"TemplateData integration is awesome."
They'll probably like even more guided, and eventually rich DOM, editing
of template parameters based on TemplateData hinting, which is something
we're working on now (starting with title search-ahead).
"How do I insert <code> tags?" (He
didn't notice the "More" link in the
font menu.)
Yeah, this is something I'm not totally sold on how we can solve. Giving
immediate access to all 20+ text styling options wouldn't be so great
(overwhelming, and encouraging people to use rarely-used and indeed
rarely-appropriate but valid options like <mark> or others; there's also
the possibility for extensions to add to this list, so it's not trivial to
make the design scale appropriately). We may re-visit this at some point.
Suggestions and examples of this done well (or poorly!) elsewhere always
welcome. :-)
"How do I set the width of a table column?"
This is a pretty low priority for us, and coming up with a clean design
that pushes users into (a) not using it at all, and (b) if they really
must, strongly encouraging them to use %age-based columnar widths would
take more time than it's worth to us.
"How do I copy and paste table rows?"
This was just completed this week into master, and will roll out to
Wikimedia wikis this coming week, and will be part of the REL1_27 release.
You can play with it at
http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Table if
you want a sneak preview. ;-)
On first blush this looks like the changes we've made since REL1_26 have
changed this issue a bit, but I'll look at it properly when it's not 22:45
on a Friday.
"I didn't see the editing tools at first
because they're white on a white
background."
One of the key design objectives of the VE project has been, since the
start, moving towards making editing a simple and easy and as close as
possible to reading; as part of this, the visual separation between modes
is intentionally light-weight and indeed we're thinking long-term about
ways to initiate editing on a smaller scale than "the page" – something
like an edit button against each paragraph which lets you edit and exit
quickly.
"Can we save the page without having a
pop-up?"
Yes, right now the "save" step is pretty heavy-weight, partially as part
of our desire for Wikimedia wikis to ensure that people are consciously and
intentionally publishing onto the Internet forever. I've done some thinking
about moving the licence-acknowledgement step up-front into a one-time only
thing, and so making saving much less heavy-weight a process. This kind of
change is likely to be necessary for any future ventures into the equally
exciting and concerning epic product changes related to real-time
collaborative editing. In the mean time, a double-press of the keyboard
shortcut will bring it up and immediately initiate save, though that
doesn't exactly fix the issue raised.
Hope this helps!
Yours,
--
James D. Forrester
Lead Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester(a)wikimedia.org | @jdforrester