Bit Stampede

We did a second push of the Kuma code to MDN last night to pick up a few bonus changes!

The “sample finder”

The biggest new feature is the addition of a new button has been added to the toolbar to let you insert an <iframe> for any code sample from anywhere on MDN. Simply click the button in the toolbar. This will present you with a dialog box like the following:

You can choose any section in the current document from which to pull sample code (which comes from the <pre> blocks inside that section). You can even choose to pull the sample from a different article entirely! This lets you reuse samples, share bits of code across pages, and so forth.

But wait, there’s more!

We have a few other updates, too!

• One of the fixes from earlier yesterday, to set minimum widths for columns in the revision dashboard, didn’t actually get picked up in the first push. It did, however, in the second.
• There have been more updates to the copy for the February Dev Derby.
• We reverted some of the changes to the Persona login, because the change to using the new API was not as simple has we’d been led to believe.

We continue to drive ever onward, forward, and upward!

We’ve updated the Kuma platform on the MDN wiki this afternoon. Today’s update has lots of changes. A lot of them are somewhat hidden from view, but there’s been a lot of progress on stabilization, upgrades to dependencies, and the like. There’ve also been some real changes that may be of some use to you.

• The Italian language is no longer listed twice in the Languages drop-down menu.
• The HTML dir attribute is now in our Bleach whitelist, so you can use it in content on MDN.
• When editing an article, the editor page’s <title> now includes the article’s title, so you can more easily find it among your browser’s tabs.
• Special subtrees of the MDN site are now excluded from getting the “new” style applied to links to them. These are: /docs/new, docs/tag, /docs/feeds, /docs/templates, and /docs/needs-review.
• More bits of the infrastructure for supporting getting lists of subpages from KumaScript code have landed.
• Middle-clicking on an article title in the revision dashboard’s list now opens that page in a new tab.
• Clicking on a user name in the revision dashboard list now filters on that username, showing you only that user’s changes.
• Lots of work has been done on improving compatibility with a new version of Django we’re preparing to move to. There’s more to do, but this push is a very big initial step.
• Automated test coverage has been improved.

We continue to teeter on the brink of landing full support for the following sweet capabilities, but aren’t quite there yet:

• Page moving; this will let us move one or more pages from one place in our site hierarchy to another. This will be totally awesome to have.
• A page.subpages() KumaScript function; this will return a code-readable list of all of the subpages of a given page. This will make it much easier to automate certain tasks in templates.
• A wiki.tree() KumaScript function; this will return an HTML tree of links to subpages of a given page (or the current page). This will make it trivial to create simple landing pages for subsections of MDN. We have several broken landing pages waiting for the arrival of this function, so I’m pretty excited that work is progressing!

Things are moving along really well, and I’m still super excited about how well work on Kuma is going, and how far we’ve come. This platform has been great so far, and has so much more to offer in the future!

That’s right, everyone! We have a very lovely update of MDN’s Kuma platform for you today with some nice enhancements and fixes. This should be the last one of the week, unless we really blew it today.

• When you click the button to insert a new live code sample, you now get prompted to enter a title for it. This title is used for the header for the sample’s section, and is used to generate the IDs of each of the code blocks within. In addition, the EmbedLiveSample template call is now created for you, so you don’t have to do it yourself. It’s like magic!
• Pressing the tab key while in a <pre> block no longer alternately either inserts &nbsp; characters or insets the entire code block; instead, it just inserts two spaces, as it’s supposed to do.
• You can now have multiple compatibility tables per page.
• More of the back-end work has been done for the KumaScript features for generating lists (both code-readable and human-readable) of subpages. This capability isn’t available yet, but it should be soon. We’re getting close!
• The Revision Dashboard now lets you filter the list of revisions by locale and/or username. We’ve expanded the set of people this dashboard is available to, but it’s still a small set of core community members. I hope to open this to the whole community before a lot longer.

Obviously, the biggest changes visible to typical users here at the moment are the enhancements to live samples and editing of code snippets. However, the majority of the work in terms of sheer man-hours and hard work by our amazing development team is behind the scenes. For now. I’m really excited about the work they’re doing, and you’ll see even more excellent stuff soon!