Technical Update: November 12, 2013

Here are the latest technical updates at Wikia. Keep in mind that our system updates happen every Wednesday, so we’re posting this on a Tuesday to give you advance notice. Also note that we change hundreds of tiny details every week, so these are just the highlights.

New Features

• On communities with Darwin fluid layout enabled, two new options are added to Theme Designer:
  • The option to set a second, middle background color to show inside "the split" that appears when background images are divided in half.
  • A "no split" option for single-image backgrounds that are 2100px or wider.

Major Bugs Fixed

• Over the weekend images were sometimes updating slowly, particularly affecting ThemeDesigner changes. This fix is already live.
• The video tool was not pulling video thumbnails from the various providers. This fix is already live.
• The welcome tool was so welcoming, founders were sometimes welcoming themselves!
• Deleting old revisions of files sometimes caused an error message to appear.
• Darwin: Forum thread headings had extra left margin.
• VisualEditor: Suggestion dropdowns for categories and templates were not appearing.

Other Notable Changes

Detailed CSS updates can be found at http://report.wikia.net - the diffs show changes to .css, .scss, .tmpl.php, .html, .sass and .mustache files in Wikia's codebase.

• We no longer support addition of videos from Viddler.com due to changes in their URL structure. Viddler videos already present on Wikia communities will remain active, and are still available for use on other pages on the same community.
• CreateBox's 'prefix' option now works with the 'Create a new article' dialog.
• My Wikia 1.1.1 is available, with minor bug fixes.

Select Known Issues

• It is not currently possible to add videos from Metacafe.
• The content of the user toolbar is aligned to the left edge of the browser window, as opposed to the left edge of the content area. Formerly this was only seen on communities with fluid layout enabled. The forthcoming fix will restore the content area alignment for all communities.

Questions? Comments? Feel free to leave them below. And if you have additional bugs to report, please send them to us via Special:Contact.

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