Kuma update: November 13, 2012

 MDN, Mozilla  1 Response »
Nov 132012
 

Today we have another update the the Kuma code on MDN to talk about. It’s a small-seeming update that has a lot of big stuff going on in it.

The big change is the addition of a new button next to the <pre> button. This button inserts boilerplate code for our new live sample system. I’ve written up documentation for the current implementation of the live sample system (please take special note of the information about a bug that requires some source-mode twiddling to make things work), and you can see it in action in, of all places, the example section of the <marquee> documentation. The live sample system will get much easier to use over time, with a handy user interface for setting things up, editing the samples, and so forth, but this is a start!

There are a few other improvements, as well:

  • The <figcaption> element has been added to the HTML whitelist.
  • Changes to the slug on a a translated page are saved correctly; see bug 809617.
  • Improved the line-wrapping in tag list pages, such as this one for the tag “Media”.

That’s it. A few little things, plus the first pass at the live sample system. A happy update!

 Posted by at 5:15 PM  Tagged with:

Slow but steady wins the race?

 Mozilla, Personal  2 Responses »
Nov 122012
 

This week, I’ll be working again, albeit slowly. After many weeks of working slowly, that’s hardly unusual. However, what’s different is that hopefully things are on the upswing at last! Last Wednesday (November 7th), I had surgery to correct a spinal problem in my neck. In technical terms, I had an anterior cervical discectomy with fusion. This corrected a long-standing problem I’ve had with certain nerves in my neck — in addition to my spinal cord — being compressed, causing severe pain, coordination problems, and so forth.

Now that this problem is corrected, I can begin, finally, to recover!

Right now, of course, I’m recovering from the surgery. My pain is by and large not bad at all, and is much, much less than what I was going through previously. However, it does slow me down a bit, and if I sit up working for too long, I get very tired and have to take a rest. So I’ll be on again, off again on IRC and the like, and will be picking and choosing what I work on for the week.

But things should be getting better from here on out! I can’t wait!

 Posted by at 5:19 PM

Kuma update: November 8, 2012

 MDN, Mozilla  No Responses »
Nov 122012
 

We had another small update to the Kuma software that powers MDN on Thursday! Let’s take a quick look at what’s new:

  • You can now add revision comments when saving translation updates.
  • While in the editor, Ctrl+LeftArrow and Ctrl+RightArrow move backward and forward a word at a time now.
  • Fixed a bug in attachment handling.
  • Removed a notice about articles not having any “approved translations.” Since we don’t use an approval process, this message wasn’t needed.
  • When using a right-to-left locale but viewing an article in English because there isn’t a translation available, the article should be displayed left-to-right. This is fixed.

Like I said, mostly fairly small changes, but between the handy editor tweak and the improvements for our international users, these are welcome improvements.

 Posted by at 9:30 AM  Tagged with:

Kuma update: November 7, 2012

 MDN, Mozilla  No Responses »
Nov 082012
 

There’s been another update to the Kuma software that powers the Mozilla Developer Network’s documentation wiki. A few things here, none of them super-huge. We continue to see most of the development team putting their time toward Big Things that hopefully will start reaching production soon.

  • Fixed errors in slug handling while editing pages under some circumstances.
  • Tabbing in the link editor dialog no longer causes it to close itself automatically if it thinks you’ve made your selection.
  • <span class=”nowiki”> in code samples, previously used when we were on MindTouch to prevent URLs from being turned into links in code samples, now has no effect and is not displayed in the samples.
  • Added dividing lines between the columns in the revision dashboard (still only available to a few people for testing).
  • Moved the revision dashboard into a new /dashboards/ subtree, in preparation for the addition of other dashboards in the future.
  • A few more promotional text adjustments.

We’re working up plans for our next sprint now. I hope that we will see live code samples and a few other big deal projects make it to production before the end of November!

 Posted by at 2:39 PM  Tagged with:

Kuma update: November 1, 2012

 MDN, Mozilla  No Responses »
Nov 012012
 

This afternoon, we pushed a new build of Kuma to MDN. This version’s biggest win for typical users is it finally fixes the bug that was causing garbage to be displayed instead of content on certain pages. This mostly impacted the localization teams and their readers.

Here’s a look at what’s changed:

  • Cleanup work has been done to the UI in the revision dashboard. Most of you won’t see this yet, but it’s there.
  • There was a stray avatar image that was not being loaded securely, resulting in security warnings loading some pages. This has been fixed.
  • Font accesses have been made more intelligent in order to reduce unnecessary loads from the CDN. Previously, these were being incorrectly expired with every single access, requiring reloads of fonts all the time instead of allowing them to be cached.
  • Your profile page now lets you create API keys that you can use to work with the MDN API. Only some parts of the API require a key, including the new write API that lets you use PUT requests to manipulate content on pages. This API is not yet documented, but will be in the next few days.
  • The link for reporting login trouble has been updated to route the problem reports to the right place in Bugzilla.
  • Dev Derby copy has been updated for November 2012 and January 2013 text.
  • Other promotional text has been revised.

The bugs fixed here — especially the garbled text one and the font access improvements — will make life much better for a lot of people, especially those not reading en-US from within North America. The write API is going to make it possible to build some incredible tools for MDN. We’ll be sure to keep you posted about when documentation becomes available for that. It should be very very soon!

 Posted by at 6:17 PM  Tagged with:

Kuma update: October 26, 2012

 MDN, Mozilla  No Responses »
Oct 262012
 

We’ve got a fresh update to the Kuma software that powers the MDN wiki for you! There’s not a lot of visible stuff here, but a lot is going on:

  • The “Sort table” option in the contextual menu that appears in the editor when you right-click on a table has returned!
  • The first preview version of our revision dashboard has been implemented. It’s nowhere near finished yet, but it’s a start. Because the current implementation is very low performance, access is currently heavily restricted to a few select people. We’ll open it up to everyone once the performance is in a safer place.
  • The wiki is now configured to use Mozilla’s content delivery network (CDN) to improve performance. Speed should be very noticeably improved now, especially if you’re outside North America.

The revision dashboard is a new feature we’re working on that will provide a one-stop page where you can go to see all the most recent changes to the site. You can see a mock-up for what it will eventually more or less look like:

A mockup of what the revisions dashboard will more or less look like eventually

And here’s what the current preview version actually looks like:

A screenshot of the current build of the revisions dashboard

The appearance is currently extremely rough, and none of the filters or features for actually manipulating the revisions in any way have been put into place yet.

The top area is a list of all of the most recent changes to the site (newest revision first, getting progressively older in each row in the list). Clicking on a change displays the diff for that change below.

This provides a convenient way to quickly review changes to the site.

Over time, this dashboard will offer features for reverting changes, banning users (if you’re an admin), quickly getting to pages to do an edit or view the page’s full history, and so forth. In addition, eventually we will find and use a better diff display that shows you a better look at the page. At any rate, this is very exciting progress, and I promise you’ll get to use this yourself before too long!

 Posted by at 4:02 PM  Tagged with:

The MDN event reference, at last

 Firefox, Geekology, MDN, Mozilla  6 Responses »
Oct 252012
 

After years of wishing we had a complete reference to events supported by Firefox (both standard events and non-standard ones, including those used just for add-ons), we finally have one! Louis-Rémi Babé has produced the Mozilla event reference! He scoured specifications, existing documentation, and the source tree, hunting down every event and documenting it. At this point, if any are missing, it’s purely an oversight. Please feel free to contribute additions and corrections as needed. In particular, we could really use help building out compatibility tables for each event.

When I first joined Mozilla 6 ½ years ago, one of the first things I noticed was that we had no thorough reference to events. Indeed, even what little documentation we had for events was strewed haphazardly through the docs, such as bits of documentation for certain DOM events being contained within pages about the DOM objects that send them. Over time, occasional abortive attempts were made to unify or at least standardize this content, but not much ever came of it. Finally, Louis-Rémi got on the job late this summer and pounded it out.

There’s likely some clean-up work left to be done, and odds are we could use more examples of how to make use of some of these events. However, the fact that we finally have an easy way to hunt down the right event for the task at hand is a victory for the MDN community and for the broader Web development community.

Well done, Louis-Rémi! Thank you!

 Posted by at 9:12 AM

If MDN search isn’t working for you…

 MDN, Mozilla  2 Responses »
Oct 192012
 

Check to see if you have the Ghostery extension installed. It appears to have recently added, by default, blocking of the Google search API. MDN uses this API for its search functionality. If you disable this block in that extension’s settings, searching MDN will work again.

 Posted by at 11:09 AM

Kuma update: October 11, 2012

 MDN, Mozilla  No Responses »
Oct 112012
 

Yep! Even though we did a push yesterday, we have another one today! A few things that needed extra testing, or weren’t quite ready yesterday are ready now. There’s a lot of stuff here in preparation for the launch of the first pass of our live sample support! These are exciting times!

  • Fixed a bug that was causing page edits to sometimes create faulty redirects to their parents.
  • Initial work on the live sample view. I will blog separately about this once it’s ready to actually use. This is one of the things I’ve been looking forward to for years!
  • The CSS class names used by the syntax highlighter are better; this is related to the sample view work.
  • All site images have been further optimized (losslessly), thereby reducing size by about 10%.

So progress is progress! We should have the ability to actually use the new live sample features soon!

 Posted by at 5:56 PM  Tagged with:

Kuma update: October 10, 2012

 MDN, Mozilla  No Responses »
Oct 102012
 

We have a new update to the Kuma software that drives the MDN site today! This is an interesting assortment of changes, most of which you probably won’t directly notice, but should improve the site on a general level.

  • MDN now has a sitemap.xml file, which is automatically updated periodically. This should improve SEO, possibly significantly.
  • RSS feeds were being generated based on the wrong timestamp, resulting in spurious entries in the feeds being created whenever anyone force-refreshed a page. Now this won’t happen anymore.
  • The keyboard shortcuts for “save” and “save-and-exit” have been swapped, so that they match what we intended.
  • A lot of back-end work has been done toward implementing page moving. It’s not yet exposed to users, though.
  • The content of the <title> of pages on MDN has been changed slightly to improve legibility.
  • The <ruby>, <rp>, and <rt> elements are now allowed in article contents.
  • The font-variant CSS property is now allowed in article contents.
  • A <dfn> element is now used on the slug box in the editor to provide an explanation of what the term “slug” means; this will help users understand how things are done a little better.
  • Some administrative code has been written to help repair some translated pages which are missing their breadcrumb trails.

There’s a lot of code here. In particular, a ton of work has been done toward implementing page moving. Just because you don’t see it yet doesn’t mean a lot of progress hasn’t been made. This should reach these golden shores soon!

Our development team continues to amaze me. There are some great updates coming soon. Prepare to enjoy some fabulous new features soon!

 Posted by at 2:17 PM  Tagged with:
 Older Entries  Newer Entries