Page MenuHomePhabricator

Display the Table of Contents (ToC) during edit
Open, LowPublic8 Estimated Story PointsFeature

Description

The Table of Contents (ToC) vanishes in edit-mode.

Seeing the complete ToC during editing, can help prevent mistakes in both content and article-layout.

This can be particularly problematic in articles that have long infoboxes or many images near the top. We're /meant/ to space items, so that having the ToC collapsed/hidden doesn't negatively effect the layout, but this is often not the case in pages at less than Featured quality.


Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement
See Also:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53217

Details

Reference
bz49224

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to High.Nov 22 2014, 1:53 AM
bzimport set Reference to bz49224.

Agreed, this is something we want to do. Right now the focus is getting the initial editing tools out for the beta, but this should be something we get to reasonably soon after that.

The core ToC widget is now merged, but doesn't insert in the right location so is disabled in production until that is fixed. Resetting.

Jdforrester-WMF moved this task from To Triage to Blocked on the VisualEditor board.
Jdforrester-WMF set Security to None.
Jdforrester-WMF renamed this task from VisualEditor: Display the Table of Contents (ToC) during edit to Display the Table of Contents (ToC) during edit.Nov 24 2014, 3:49 PM
Jdforrester-WMF lowered the priority of this task from High to Low.Jan 9 2015, 10:33 PM
Jdforrester-WMF edited a custom field.

While editing, is it possible to display a message when people click on the TOC? Like "TOC is automatically created with section titles. To edit TOC, edit these titles.")
Based on my experience, people sometimes ask to have different items on the TOC than in the sections titles. As they can edit everything on the page with VE, they may believe they can edit the TOC too.

It would be nice to have clickable TOC items to easily browse the page we’re editing.

Are there any serious obstacles why this idea is not implemented yet? For newcomers, it is really difficult to understand this behavior and learn how to work around it.

Yes - there are difficult technical obstacles to having an un-movable, un-editable and auto-positioned TOC within the regular contenteditable area. There is a experimental version of this in the code, but it is buggy.

Aklapper changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Feature Request".Feb 4 2022, 11:13 AM
Aklapper removed a subscriber: rmoen.