A recent initiative for the development of the Kuma software powering the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) site is that we are going to be maintaining a list of the top five “paper cut” bugs that we’d like the dev team to find time to fix. These won’t have a schedule attached to them, and will only be worked on when other, priority items are fixed, but will each have a huge impact on the site’s usability, functionality, or simple friendliness.
During the MDN writing staff meeting (about which I’ll be blogging over the next few days), we pored over the long list of pending MDN bugs and selected the five we’d like to see the development team try to tackle as time allows.
- Fix the positioning of the save button and the revision comment edit box so they’re closer to each other, so that scrolling around to get at them isn’t necessary. These should always be available without having to scroll.
- Fix the “Clone this page” option so that it works again. It’s been broken for months.
- Implement subtree watching. The current page watching feature only watches the one page you’ve asked to watch, and we need to add the option to watch all of its subpages as well.
- When a page is reverted to a previous version, the cached rendered copy of the page isn’t rebuilt, which means that visitors to the page keep seeing the wrong version of the page. We need to fix this so that reverting also immediately rebuilds the page.
- When you visit a page that’s reached through a redirect, the page’s URL contains added query information that indicates where the redirect came from. This bloats the URL unnecessarily. This, as well as some display information about the redirect in-page, needs to be cleaned up.
I think you’ll agree that each time one of these is fixed, there will be celebratory riots in the streets!