After a truly massive amount of JavaScript and VB.net programming, I’m almost ready to release the forums on the world.
The biggest changes since yesterday revolve around my adaptation and implementation of PostEditor 2 which allows you to use a standard textbox like TextMate (on the Mac), thought to be one of the most intuitive text editor there is.
The VB.net I was talking about went into my HTML parser, placing the final step in me allowing users to post HTML comments. It only allows certain tags and attributes so people shouldn’t be able to post nasty things. I’m sure I’ll have to revisit it over time.
Back to the text-editor — It only really supports Firefox at the moment. For some reason the bind just doesn’t work for IE and Opera gets all the selections wrong… But lets be positive! Here are some of the features you can try out (browser-limiting):
Snippets: type a, bq, blockquote, strong, em, ol or li followed by tab and it will place the tag on the page. Lists will also autogenerate: press tab after a </li> element and it will make a new one for you and put the cursor in the correct place.
There are also a certain number of crtl+key items including: b for strong/bold, q for blockquote, i for italic/em, / to escape the current HTML and a to create a link.
test it out here
It’s pretty damned cool and it’ll be even better once I’ve cleaned up more of the original author’s code and managed to figure out where these cross-browser issues are.
The current version is compressed but I’ll release the full code (and probably a WordPress plug-in to go with it) when I’ve pushed out the bugs.
Anyway… The forums are around the corner. Everything is in place — they just needed some closed testing before I release the code on the world.