New editing feature: adding new entities from inline search fields

As mentioned in the blog post for the 2013-12-23 server release, a useful new feature for editors is the option to add new entities directly from inline search fields:

There’s an “Add a new [entity]” button at the bottom of (most) search result menus, which upon clicking will open up a dialog in the page. The dialog contains a form identical to the one you’re used to when creating entities the old-fashioned way — that is, from the Editing menu at the top of the website.

Once you’ve successfully added a new entity from the dialog, it’ll be automatically loaded into the search field you started from.

The visible exceptions to this feature are that you can’t add new areas (only location editors can add those), or releases (because those take a lot longer to add, and it wouldn’t be useful to do so in a small dialog that you can accidentally close), and finally, you can’t spawn an add-entity dialog within another add-entity dialog. 🙂

Another change that went along with this feature (that editors should be aware of) is that we now require artists and labels to be selected on the “Release Information” tab of the release editor.

Previously, you could enter plain text into these fields, proceed to the next tab without selecting a search result, and handle creation on the “Add Missing Entities” tab. Because “Add Missing Entities” has a very limited UI, in the future we’d like to remove it in favor of easier entity-creation on the other tabs. This is a small step towards that. Note that you can still use “Add Missing Entities” for track artists — this change only affects the release artist and release labels on the first tab.

Don’t hesitate to report any bugs or suggestions about this feature to our issue tracker: http://tickets.musicbrainz.org/