New toolbar, AJAX saving, and other fixes for the post editor

Today we’ve released a few enhancements to the new post editor, fixed some bugs, created a new one or two, and left a handful of things to fix later.

New Stuff

• AJAX save. We’re still not saving posts automatically, but now the “Save Now” button will keep the post editor open, and Ctrl-S works as a shortcut for saving. (Internet Explorer users: use Ctrl-Shift-S to save.)
• New toolbar. This toolbar looks better, loads more quickly, and has undo and redo buttons. By popular demand, the full justification button has returned. We’ve also added a strike through button and improved the color palettes.
• Vertical resizing. You can now change the height of the post editor by dragging the resize handle in the lower right (near the labels field). The size is saved in a per-user, per-blog preference.

Fixed Bugs

• <div>s in Edit HTML are now better-preserved in Compose mode. This should fix most post summary hacks. If your hack uses <span> tags, please switch to using <div>s.
• Lists created in Compose mode can now have new items added to them after switching to Edit HTML and back.
• Line breaking is no longer lost when editing a post in the old editor that was first written in the new editor.
• Nested block-level elements no longer create odd blank lines.
• Non-breaking spaces now consistently appear as &nbsp; in Edit HTML mode.

New Bugs (that we know about)

• The publish and save buttons wrap oddly on Mac browsers.

Major Remaining Bugs (that we know about)

• The Font Size menu has 4 sizes instead of 5, and “normal” looks small.
• Paragraph tags are lost when switching from Edit HTML to Compose.
• The Blockquote button still behaves oddly, especially in Internet Explorer.
• The URL an image links to cannot be changed without using Edit HTML mode.
• Images inserted with this editor do not pick up border styles from the blog template.
• Inserting a new link with the link dialog loses your place in the post. 

Find anything else? See: How to report HTML bugs with the new post editor



Things Left To Add

• Toolbar in Edit HTML mode
• Autosave
• Spellcheck
• Video upload
• FTP image upload
• Bi-directional text input and Indic transliteration 
• and a handful of smaller things too numerous to include here