Darwinian delights/A new VisualEditor

Today, I've asked BertH to be put on the list of the early adopters of the new Darwin VisualEditor.

As the person who ultimately gave up on the old Visual Editor (sometimes called the Rich Text Editor) and facilitated a discussion which ultimately banned the RTE from this site, I might not seem the likeliest champion for a new VisEd.

However, I can tell you that this new VisEd is nothing like the old one. It's pretty impressive stuff, to be honest. It doesn't quite do everything yet — hence the need for a period of beta testing — but it is absolutely, positively 100% different than the old RTE. It could well revolutionise the total number of pople actively editing the site, which will only decrease our individual workloads and increase the quality and quantity of our content.

As you know, the greatest concern we had about the old visual editor was that it just dumped raw code onto pages, leaving us with a lot of cleanup to do. So this was naturally a question I had of the VisEd team when I met with them. I'm totally satisfied that it's not technically possible for that to occur, because the basis for this new editor specifically precludes it.

The strength of this new editor is that it's going to make fixing typos and adding snippets of text intuitively easy for new users. It does not in any way jeopardise "normal" or "source" editing. It just makes it super easy to fix typos and make other changes to the base text of a page. It's a little weak on the table and template side, but only a little. It's certainly a step up from the old visual editor.

The only thing I don't like about it is the name. I argued that for ease of communication, they should have gone for a different name. Cause now we have Visual Editor, which was disappointing, and VisualEditor, which has a lot of promise.

I don't have a timetable for implementation, but when it comes online, please use this thread to discuss any problems you're having, or to talk about the things you like.