new create entries beta

[denise]

We had the old "new JS on journals" beta reporting entry as the topmost entry in this comm, which was causing some confusion! So, a fresh post for people to report problems they're having with the new Create Entries beta.

Things not yet implemented:

* a WYSIWYG/rich text editor to allow people to post formatted entries

* the ability to save draft entries, both so you can deliberately postpone entries for posting later and so that an unexpected browser crash or problem during the posting process won't cause you to lose work

* admin editing of community entries

* the "don't autoformat" checkbox (we can't quite figure out which pane to stick it in!)

Things that will be documented once it comes out of beta, but some people have missed:

* if you don't like the placement of panels or don't want to see certain panels, you can customize the placement and which panels appear by using the " Settings" link in the main toolbar at the beginning of the form.

If you have anything else to report, please let us know here!

Comments

[earnedmystripes]

hi! for some reason when I was trying to select an icon on the beta create entries page, the icon selection wouldn't take? I tried it on both Chrome and Firefox and it kept going back to default even though it showed as chosen in the "browse" window. the icon dropdown list when i tried to force it that way also had just blank space for any icons that didn't have keywords, instead of pic#...

I can take screencaps if this description isn't enough. Thank you!

[denise]

known issue with icons that were uploaded without keywords! (it happens everywhere, not just on the new update page) it's on the list!

[lizvogel]

(I've mentioned this on a couple of News posts, but not sure if it ever got over here. Sorry if this is a duplicate.)

In Opera 10, the Subject and Entry fields are unlabeled. Or rather, the labels appear and then are wiped away by something as the page finishes loading, so fast that they're only visible for a second if my internet connection is really sucking that day. Not a disaster, but it'd be nice to have them. (And of course I don't know if anything else is affected, since I didn't know there were labels until someone else mentioned them.)

Everything else on the beta update page appears to be working fine.

Opera 10.00 (Yes, I know it's old. I like it.)
WinXP
no browser extensions, JavaScript is enabled, etc.

[lorata]

this is not a complaints post, this is a "hnnnnnnnngh omg why did I not get the beta create entries page sooner it is so sexy I love you guys hnalkfns;ldkfj;" post.

so.

there's that.

(seriously, the drop-down tags is so much better than the auto-fill and was my only real beef with DW's old create entries page, and the whole drag-and-rearrange-or-hide thing solved a problem I didn't know I had EVERYTHING IS BEAUTIFUL)

***EDITED TO ADD***

I actually had been waffling on whether to renew my paid account because I crosspost to LJ and all my discussion/commenting goes on there, but one look at your new create entries page vs the migraine-inducing travesty that is LJ's and I immediately went and bought a new 12-month.

[zaluzianskya]

Hi! I was just wondering, when the new create entries page is live and ready, would it be possible to get some sort of option to copy our preferences (via perhaps a text string of some sort) and paste them somewhere to quickly set them (such as on a different account)? It would be really useful to me since I have a lot of different accounts, and I'm sure other RPers would find it helpful too.

[denise]

that's definitely something that should go through suggestions!

Crosspost do not work for new entries.

[eldhenn]

I have a setting "always crosspost to LJ", and in old interface my entries actually always do that.
In new interface, I have "checked-and-disabled" checkbox under "Crosspost" panel. And entry DO NOT crossposted once it posted to DW! I have to edit the entry, and then I can check "crosspost to particual account" checkbox (which is shown unchecked!), and then it finally proceed.

My browser is Google Chrome 34.

Re: Crosspost do not work for new entries.

[eldhenn]

Or, after unsuccessful post (invalid date or whatever), page reloads, and I can see "crosspost to particual account checkbox" and be able check it on.

Can't remove mood?

[ninetydegrees]

I wanted to remove a mood on one of my entries so I switched to 'none or other' and saved but it didn't work: mood's still there. Am I supposed to do this differently?

No custom filtering?

[syntheid]

So I'm suddenly not able to select custom filters from the beta version. My filters still exist, and I can pick them if I turn off beta testing, but for whatever reason, they're not available from the new page anymore. Not sure if this should actually go through the normal support channels or not since it was working and stopped, but the page said to report issues here.

Re: No custom filtering?

[denise]

Hm. Try clearing your browser cache, then restart your browser and try again? If it was working before and isn't now, nothing has changed on our end, so it's probably something on yours. (I've just checked, and I didn't have any problems selecting a custom filter, for instance.)

[blueraccoon]

Hey - I'm having ongoing issues where when I create a post, it hides the icon options and the crosspost options. I get the little headers that says "Crosspost" but the "crosspost this entry" is grayed out and when I do post, it doesn't cross. I also can't pick an icon because that box is just...gone.

I'm using Chrome 34. As a note, when I tried to create a post in Safari it worked just fine, so I am a confusedbecc. This may be a browser bug, as Chrome's been a major pain in my ass lately, but thought you should know?

[denise]

Yeah, someone above was reporting the same thing. It looks like it's probably an issue with a Chrome update. We'll see what we can do.

[tryslora]

In the last couple of weeks when I create entries with the beta create page, I can't load tags with the Browse button and the crossposting is selected, but it doesn't select where to crosspost to. If I edit the post, I can load the tags and select for crossposting, but not when I create a new one. Has something changed? This is happening on multiple computers (but always in Chrome because that's my usual browser)--both Mac and PC.

[tryslora]

...and I didn't scroll down far enough. I see the others, and I will just hope Chrome updates again soon and maybe fixes it. Thanks! Sorry!

[telophase]

I just noticed that I can't post to anything other than my own journal on Firefox 30.0/Win7 using the beta page. The "Post to:" shows just my journal, none of the communities I have posting access to, and it's without the drop-down menu. (Chrome is working fine.)

[telophase]

And now it's back!

[ilthit]

I've had the beta test on for ages, never had any trouble, but this morning the "post entry" button became unclickable? I tried several times. Odd. The non-beta posting page works fine.

[jazzyjj]

Hope somebody sees this. I originally posted this at the entry above this one, but then I saw this and figured my comment belonged here. I just began testing the new beta Create Entries page this morning. I'm assuming this is the latest beta, since the comm hasn't been updated for like a year and a half. But anyway, I'm running the latest version of OS X El Capitan on my MacBook Air. I've tested with both VoiceOver and Chromevox, and haven't had any issues thus far. I like the new settings form.

[zaluzianskya]

How close is this to complete? I've been using the beta for so long I forget it's not the default.

[denise]

We still haven't found a good solution for rich text/WYSIWYG, which is the main thing holding it back from being appointed as default!

[ironpeacockworks]

Annoying quibble:

I have no apparent way to select a specific comment option for a particular post. If I'm missing something, please point me to it. :)

The option I'm looking for is whether I want all comments screened for "that specific post" (when it's not the journal default.) I'm looking to apply this to a "sticky", but it could be useful for any post on anyone's journal.

[denise]

It's in the Comment Settings panel!

[zvi]

read the february news post and went looking for the post as mod hat flag. It works a little differently than described 9 months ago (not surprising), but the community moderation specific widgets are not movable in the layout, which is weird because everything else is, and they are beneath all of my other post options (this means I have to scroll 2 and a half screens below the post button to get to them). I realize that other people's layouts will be somewhat different, but I think that a sometimes option that isn't really visible near the main thing one is doing (writing a post) is an option one often won't realize is there.

Probably you are limited in the amount you want to mess with adding a thing to people's create entries page, when 80% of the appeal is that one has customized it, so the two obvious solutions that leap out at me are to put the community admin stuff above the entry or to have a link to the community admin stuff appear somewhere in proximity to the post button. Not sure of the positioning tradeoffs, but just a thought.

[msilverstar]

there's no link for DW-specific HTML as there was on the older create entry page

the default date URL is a great idea, but it is not correct for PST, it says 12/31 when it is 12/30.

[chalcedony_starlings]

FWIW, what I'd really like is for “don't auto-format” to have an autodetect in itself. (I'm writing this here because the lack of it is the one critical thing keeping me off the new create-entry page.)

My use case is that what I want to output to my journal is correct-by-my-standards paragraph divisions in the output HTML, with exactly no “<br><br>” silliness. I'm okay typing these in myself, but then of course I have to turn off “auto-format”. The only way I can stop the march of the icky unsemantic line break tags if auto-format is on is by wrapping my EOLs in comments, or typing the entire thing on one input line…

But what would be really convenient for me is if it detected that I was inserting my own paragraph tags and turned itself off. I think it's a pretty safe assumption that within and between block elements people are manually inserting, the “auto-format” line breaks are undesired because they can just insert their own, but I guess there might be backcompat issues with this, or with the WYSIWYG editor which I've never tried. As a side effect, this would also save me having to click two times when leaving comments every time, because the “don't auto-format” checkbox doesn't show up in the quick-comment form, only on the full preview page…

(What would be even nicer is if the auto-format gave me nice clean HTML with auto-paragraph detection rather than icky line breaks. But that seems like even more work and risk.)

[denise]

Yeah, that's a lot harder than it looks -- trying to parse HTML is really not an easy problem. We don't use the <br> tags because we think we're correct to do so, we do so because AUUUGH HTML PARSING

[chalcedony_starlings]

(Oh, right. I guess the incomplete handling of custom moods with preset mood icons was the other thing, maybe? I forget…)

Beta Posts

[kemander]

Abhorrently slow response time; in fact, so slow it forgets what it was supposed to do and repeats a prior task in the space I've given it a different task to do. There also isn't any means provided to corral picture or image perimeters to a desired size, rather than the image being larger than the entire page or even my 19 inch monitor size.

I am using this on a Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop running on Windows 7 with all the latest updates installed automatically, using the Google Chrome browser, Version 71.0.3578.98 (Official Build) (64-bit).

My Experience So Far

[kemander]

Has been pretty smooth sailing. A little brush-up was needed to recall some HTML issues, but it's always a good time for one to re-consolidate forgotten past. Your support has been tremendously helpful, for which I thank you all from the deepest abyss of my molten core; So, a huge Thank You for a great effort from you and your staff.

Kudos and Gratitude.

Kemander

[silverr]

JUST started poking at this; I realize that the feedback window might be past, but decided to toss comments up anyhow.

LOVING how much easier it is to edit and select tags, and change permissions!

SUGGESTION: I do like that the DELETE button has a larger buffer zone than previously! the only tweak I thought of was to make that button a distinct color (orange or red wouldbe great, though though I realize red is problemmatic or useless for those with visual issues.)

Finally, a small bug/visual glitch: When I first opened the window (desktop computer with large monitor, details below) a few days ago, the entry and display area for tags was nice and large. However, after experimenting with the "Display column next to main entry area" setting and trying to default to the original layout, the tags box remains determinedly small. Neither reset+refresh nor trying to drag the window width out with the half-saltine (see picture below) works. (Is this a "completely empty your browser cache" issue?)

Pictures after mucking with settings (different account, different browser, same computer):
https://i.imgur.com/GCIOFSq.png
https://i.imgur.com/xXyDoI5.png

Picture of how it looked by default: https://i.imgur.com/uM8xr09.png?3
(ETA: Also looks this way for the affected account if I log in with a different browser)

Windows 7 Home Premium + SP 1 (64bit)
Browser: FFox Quantum, up to date as of 4 Jan 2019 (no version given in About box!)
Browser display 1024 x 768 on a 1920 x 1200 monitor (text size 150% in Windows display options)
Addons: Acrobat, Kaspersky, Google Reverse Image Search

[denise]

Hmmm, that is weird. Does it still happen if you use the upper right hand collapse button in the Tags pane and then uncollapse it?

[stellar_dust]

Hi! I've recently come back to DW after a very long hiatus and only just realized I was still opted in for beta testing. Having now toggled back and forth to remind myself what the old entry form looked like, I notice there are a lot of features still missing: comment settings, age restriction settings, crossposting settings, autosave, the image embed link to the user's DW gallery, the ability to log in to a different journal just for one post .. and maybe other stuff.

Is the page likely to be out of beta and/or gain these functions any time in the near future? Or should I just switch off the beta if I want autosave etc?

ETA: Overall I really like the functionality and the layout of the beta page! There are just .. some things that I miss.

[stellar_dust]

Update: It has been pointed out to me that some of these things are available in the page settings. But not all of them? Especially image embedding and autosave?

[denise]

Your account doesn't have any of the beta features turned on, so the problems you're seeing aren't beta related! Leave a comment on the dw_maintenance entry about the code push and include links to the actual entries (not just the screenshots) so we can see the code you're using.

[dreadlordmrson]

I was just testing the new tag entry (not super into it... I prefer the tags be pure text not the little boxes...), and I hit enter by mistake as I do sometimes and it tried to post the entry and got the usual error of me not putting any text in the body of the post.
Except... it wiped my tags when it did that. I don't want to have to re-enter my tags whenever I have a clumsy moment.

Cut Tag

[ranunculus]

I post pictures regularly. Usually I want them behind a cut tag as not to annoy people who don't want to scroll through them. I never got them to work under Rich Text in the old version, I always had to finish writing my post, switch to HTML and put the tag in. The beta version says it gives me a cut tag, but the button actually gives an open and a close tag so I STILL have to go to HTML and move or remove the close tag. Not user friendly. I would love a button that I can use, in Rich Text, that will insert and nothing else.

Re: Cut Tag

[pangolin20]

I think you need to select everything you want to hide first, and then place the cut. That works for me, at least.