Hi all, is there a reason why the Insert Template widget in VisualEditor looks and behaves differently than the TemplateWizard in WikiEditor? Is there a plan to update the Insert Template in the way the TemplateWizard looks like? I believe this is quite important from the UX-point of view. Anyway, great update for the WikiEditor, indeed!
Topic on Help talk:Extension:TemplateWizard/Flow
Hi @YjM. The insert template widget you see in VisualEditor has been there since a few years. The wishlist project was to bring that functionality to the WikiEditor so when we were working on it, we decided to give it a UI update. I don't believe the VisualEditor team (known as Editing team now) has any plans to update the VisualEditor version currently but I do plan to bring this up with them in case they are interested. Thanks for the feedback!
It is because developers reinvented the wheel. To put it simply they are different applications. One only works in Wikitext Editor and the other is part of Visualeditor and doesn't work elsewhere. For instance, Visualeditor doesn't have any date input dialog, nor a specific one for adding numbers. Both are currently added as simple text.
In principle they should be sharing code, in practice chances are that they will diverge more as time goes by.
That's correct. The reason we had to split it up is because the template widget you see in VisualEditor is built in such a way that the code cannot be extracted out or reused outside of VE. We had a long discussion about this possibility with the VisualEditor engineers and they advised us to build it from scratch. In an ideal world, the code would be the same (and shared from the same source) between the two applications.
Thanks for the answers. Honestly, yours, @NKohli (WMF), made me sad. It makes no sense, from the user's POV, why these two things, which serves the very same purpuse, might possibly be different. I hope you will find a common ground with the V|E team and will share as much of the code as possible. I will probably propose this in this years' wishlist survey, if it helps in pushing the things forward.