Technical Update: March 17, 2015

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.

Major Bugs Fixed

• The syntax highlighting beta test will be receiving a variety of bug fixes, including the following:
  • Missing wikitext highlighting on pages starting with plain text.
  • Misaligned wikitext highlighting on some pages in Chrome.
  • Misaligned wikitext highlighting after switching to and from visual mode.
  • Layout issues on the CSS/JS editor in widescreen mode.
  • Lua console not working.
• Special characters, like quotation marks, will show correctly in image tooltips.

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 will begin showing a dismissible banner notification to EU-based visitors, mentioning our use of cookies. (This is standard behaviour for sites in those countries).
  • As part of the work to support this, the code for banner notifications has been overhauled and improved, allowing more than one to appear at once, and adding Monobook support.
• The Hero Image beta test will no longer change local navigation options to a different style - it will use the standard navigation bar.
• Work on the stability and performance of Chat is ongoing. Happily, our data has shown a significant all-round improvements. Please do let us know if you run into any new issues!
• A user preference will be added to allow users to turn off wikitext syntax highlighting - it can be found near the top of the 'Editing' tab.

Looking Ahead

• Next week, Wikia will begin a trial period of releasing twice per week, on Tuesday and Thursday. The benefits of making this change are that updates get released faster, and individual releases are smaller and more manageable. There will still be a single technical update blog post, which will be posted on Wednesday late afternoon (US Pacific time). This will have details of the previous day's release and of the next day's release. When needed, the technical update will include this 'Looking Ahead' section to give details of high-profile changes expected the following week. As readers of the technical update blogs, we welcome your feedback as we move through this trial period.

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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