Bit Stampede

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:

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

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!

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!

We have a new update to the MDN Kuma wiki that’s just gone live this afternoon. There are a number of fixes for SEO as well a couple of editing experience changes that should be appreciated.

• You can now add and remove tags while using the translation user interface.
• The template editor displays properly again. Our update late last week inadvertently broke it.
• An extra <h1> block that was harming SEO has been corrected.
• Canonical links are now reported using <link rel=”canonical”> to further improve SEO.
• Window titles are now suffixed with “MDN” instead of with “Mozilla Developer Network”. This both helps SEO (since people search on “MDN,” not “Mozilla Developer Network”). It also reduces the visibility of the Mozilla brand, which is important since much of our content is browser-agnostic.
• Fixed some typos in September Dev Derby text.

A relatively modest update today. However, we continue to fight the good fight to improve our Google juice, while at the same time gradually bringing new features to our community.

Even though I’m taking time off from work this week, I still want to share the news that we have a new update to MDN’s Kuma wiki platform for you today! We have some nice improvements for you this time around:

• If you accidentally leave an editor page (by clicking the back button or going to a new page using a bookmark or the URL bar), a draft of your current state is saved locally on your computer. Returning to the page will offer to restore that draft. The recently-added alert when leaving a page has been removed in favor of this change. This is freaking awesome stuff that I’m totally stoked to have!
• The link editor now prefills the URL box with “/locale/docs/”, and when you tab to that field, the text entry point begins after that text (instead of selecting the existing content), so you can just start typing the rest of the URL. This should provide a subtle, but helpful, improvement to the amount of time it takes to create new links.
• In-wiki redirects created using the REDIRECT syntax were previously, incorrectly, 302 temporary redirects. They are now 301 permanent redirects. This will improve SEO as well as being more semantically accurate.
• A rule in the CSS for edit pages that was attempting to load a non-existent image has been corrected; this was adding up to 0.7 seconds to the load time of the edit page, every time, due to the delay caused while the 404 page was being loaded.
• The text in the “Revision comment” box that explains what the box is for has been changed slightly. It’s probably not worth mentioning even; that’s how slightly it’s changed!

Our team continues to do fabulous work — and fully half of the development team is on vacation this week, so this just shows how great they are, since great stuff continues to happen anyway.

I’ll be back at work from my vacation week the day after Labor Day (that is, I’ll be back on September 4th). See you then!

We’ve just pushed another modest update to the Kuma software that powers the MDN wiki. The biggest changes here are modest improvements that will affect our international community. Here’s a quick list of what’s changed:

• Persona login support has been enabled for all locales, including those for which there’s no Persona translation at this time. Previously, we had a specific list of locales for which we supported logging in, which kept a lot of people from editing MDN. No more!
• The text “BrowserID” has finally been corrected to “Persona” everywhere.
• The <s> and <tfoot> elements are now on the editor’s whitelist.
• Translation screens for right-to-left locales now put the original English text on the right instead of on the left; this should feel more natural for people in these locales.
• Demo Studio has been updated to use the changed URLs for documentation post-Kuma launch.

As I said, this is a pretty modest update, but the login and localization improvements should make our localization community ever-so-slightly happier! Enjoy!