User blog:Sarah Manley/You've Been Chosen to Beta Test the New Wikia Editor

Wikis are all about editing, and having a great editing tool makes contributions easy, fast, and fun. To improve your editing experience on Wikia, we have been upgrading our editor's layout and design.

This wiki has been chosen to test the new design, making you among the first to see and use it. The new editor will be enabled here Monday June 13.

What has changed
We've redesigned the experience from the ground up, so there are many updates across the board, including improvements to both the visual and source mode editing. The main changes you will see are:


 * The media features have been moved from the top toolbar to the right rail. Note: On the main page, which has no right rail, these items remain in the top toolbar area.
 * The feature list is expandable &mdash; you can see more or less depending on your preference.
 * We now have only one scrollbar on the page in the edit window.
 * Messages (such as warnings, notices, license text, etc.) have been updated and moved to more obvious and consistent locations. Note: Some messages have content updates planned.
 * We have removed the unlink toolbar button —you can still undo a link by using the right click context menu.

What hasn't changed

 * The functionality of the editor itself has not changed.
 * Source mode still works the same (but uses the new design), and the preference to disable visual mode is respected.
 * You can still switch to widescreen mode in source mode.

Future development plans
This is just our first iteration of the new editing experience. Here are a few areas we want to focus on next:


 * Faster loading
 * A spellchecker for visual mode
 * Working on interaction design &mdash; fewer fallbacks, fewer puzzle pieces, more drag-to-resize functionality
 * Your requests!

What we would love to hear about
Please leave a comment below if you notice any of the following issues:


 * General edit page bugs
 * Browser failures (e.g. feature X is broken on browser Y)
 * Missing important features (or if something exists but took a long time to find)
 * Confusing experiences

Thank you in advance for being one of the first wikis to use our new editor. We will be releasing the editor across Wikia in a series of stages over the next month as we work out any issues you come across. Stay tuned to the staff blog for further announcements.

If you have any questions - please post them below!