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Maniphest T63750

Implement a proper edit preview for MediaWiki:Sidebar
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Description

Screenshot of how this preview looks when I try it.

While trying to edit the sidebar on my wiki, I hit the "preview" button. But what's previewed bears little resemblance to an actual sidebar; it appears to not be parsed the same, and it's not a useful tool to see what effect my edits actually have.

As a result, last night's RecentChanges is full of me commiting a half-dozen attempts. Not a big deal (hence the "minor" severity), but it certainly made the editing more difficult!

Version: 1.23.0
Severity: enhancement

Attached:

MediaWikiSidebarPreviewWhat.png (840×737 px, 82 KB)

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Reference
bz61750

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Event Timeline

• bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Low.Nov 22 2014, 3:00 AM
• bzimport added a project: MediaWiki-General.
• bzimport set Reference to bz61750.
• bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).
Myself248 created this task.Feb 21 2014, 3:25 PM
Aklapper added a comment.Feb 21 2014, 7:34 PM

Thanks for taking the time to report this!

I looked at the attached screenshot but cannot see any differences in items.

Or did you refer to the rendering of the links in the main pane, dropping most of the [[foo|bar]] wiki markup?
Could you please clarify what behavior you'd expect? Also, which MediaWiki version is this about?

Myself248 added a comment.Feb 21 2014, 8:05 PM

Usually I use preview to see if my links work, to see if my link-text is done right (Is it target|name or name|target? I always forget), etc.

This preview doesn't do that. Half the tricks used in the sidebar don't work in regular pages, and they don't work in preview either. Stuff like the * SEARCH gizmo and all the naked (bracketless) thing-url|thing links. That's a syntax entirely foreign to me, and I can't use it on another page to test it out.

The behavior I'd expect is that, when previewing the Sidebar page, the links in the preview would render exactly like the links in the actual sidebar. Or the preview function would actually put my content in the physical sidebar, and just show some lorem-ipsum text, or the edit box, in the main section of the window.

To clarify further: In the screenshot, you see in the actual sidebar, the text "front page (blog)" is a link. But in the preview pane, the text "front page (blog)" is not a link, it's just useless text hanging off the side and it looks like I did something wrong. There's no way to know that it'll actually become the link text without trying it, and that means the preview isn't doing its job.

If you want a better view of the troubles I was having, diff some of the trainwreck that is http://i3detroit.org/wi/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Sidebar&action=history and witness my confusion! I forgot some separators, certain links don't work without title text, all sorts of stuff I couldn't tell was broken in the preview.

As for the version, I just discovered Special:Version, and it reports 1.21.1.

Thanks for taking the time to look into it, and putting up with my noobish bug report! :)

Ricordisamoa awarded a token.Sep 23 2015, 10:25 PM
Ricordisamoa subscribed.
Nemo_bis added a project: OKR-Work.Mar 13 2016, 10:13 AM
• Whatamidoing-WMF mentioned this in T158130: Doing a page preview on [[MediaWiki:Sidebar]] should display the sidebar to the editor.Apr 3 2017, 5:58 PM
• demon merged a task: T158130: Doing a page preview on [[MediaWiki:Sidebar]] should display the sidebar to the editor.Apr 3 2017, 8:26 PM
• demon added subscribers: • demon, • Whatamidoing-WMF.
Legoktm subscribed.Apr 3 2017, 8:34 PM

This could be implemented using a custom content model instead of treating it as wikitext.

Aklapper removed a subscriber: • wikibugs-l-list.Apr 12 2020, 9:55 AM
Aklapper changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Feature Request".Feb 4 2022, 11:13 AM
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