Grants:IEG/Visual editor- gadgets compatibility/Timeline

This project is funded by an Individual Engagement Grant

Timeline for Visual editor- gadgets compatibility

(we would add more milestones as we move forward)

Timeline	Date
spell checker gadget support in VE (Rechtschreibpruefung/Corrector ortográfico), and site-specific citation templates support (RefToolbar).	31-03-2014
Guide for creating VE gadgets with links to working examples	01-05-2014
Search & Replace including advanced replace (User:Pathoschild/Scripts/TemplateScript)	01-06-2014

Monthly updates

January

We started to work on implementing citation gadget, but it seems that it requires large rewrite/change of the backend side of the script which isn't available to us (it sits in the toolserver and is now moving to labs). We moved to implement RefToolbar gadget - since there was a bug in VE when adding new buttons - we fixed VisualEditor itself (OO.ui; [1]) and it is now possible to add custom buttons by gadgets. We also wrote guide for writing and getting into VE for gadget writers - User:ערן/VisualEditor gadgets guide (currently draft).

February

On January we got a list of important gadgets according to Spanish Wikipedia (thanks Jan eissfeldt for helping us). The first of them is Corrector ortográfico - which is a Spanish version of a German gadget (Rechtschreibpruefung) that shows spelling mistakes in articles. This gadget is in the top 15 most popular gadgets (see Gadgets/wikipedia) and we believe it may be very useful gadget in more Wikipedias and can improve the edit experience in VE. Although some modern browsers (Firefox, Chrome) have spell checking built-in - such gadget is important for browsers that don't support it and for allowing the community to maintain site specific spelling dictionary (and include professional terms that aren't included in regular dictionary). We rewrote (de:Benutzer:ערן/spellcheck.js) some parts of this gadget so it is now easier to install it in other Wikipedias without code changes at all (it only requires linking to Wikidata item d:Q15098221), and it shows mistakes in VisualEditor while writing (live). We still have to publish it for communities that use the current gadget to get feedback, and then to publish it to other wikis.

We also updated the Gadgets list - list of gadgets by popularity (according to # of users), and change its format to provide some basic data on them (screenshot + summary).

March

On March we rewrote two gadget:

RefToolbar - one of the most commonly used gadget. This gadget help editors add citation templates to articles. This gadget took big effort from us because the parts that related to it are build on oojs event base mechanism and user interface of dialogs is tightly coupled with the underlying model. The gadget code can be found in en:User:ערן/refToolbarVeLoader.js and en:User:ערן/refToolbarVe.js.
DirectionTool (he:mediawiki:Gadget-VeDirectionMarkTool.js) - This gadget is for a right to left languages (like Hebrew and Arabic). This gadget adds direction mark tool to VE. This gadget is useful also as the first real demonstration for registering plugins to VE - e.g. the plugin is loaded once the user opens the VE (he:MediaWiki:Gadget-VeExtendedBar.js).

We also updated our guide for writing and getting into VE for gadget writers, which can be found in MediaWiki wiki: mw:VisualEditor_gadgets

April

This month we focused on dialog with the community and expanding the adaptation of already existing gadget and our new gadgets in different Wikipedias and other projects: we posted a blog post in [blog.wikimedia.org/c/technology/ Wikimedia blog], and in English Wikipedia Village Pump. We got useful feedback and comments from the community, and based on this feedback we are planning our next steps: mainly improving the gadget gallery - make it update regularly and merging duplicate gadgets. We also extended the gallery with default gadgets.

We also wrote a new gadget for search and replace feature. This is missing feature in VE (see bugzilla:48368) and there are various gadgets (and even WikiEditor extension) that provides this functionality in classic code editing. We have a working feature prototype (en:User:ערן/veReplace.js), but we want to extend it a bit (to provide some more features, similar to User:Pathoschild/Scripts/TemplateScript, as suggest by Helder) before publishing.

May

This month we finished developing the "search&replace" gadget. In this gadget the user can replace a specific term in the document by another one. It also can replace one by one of the term or all of them together.

We also started to write a the "template adder" gadget. This gadget can insert template, and edit summary quickly based on user configuration. Also the user can decided where to insert the template in the document.

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