Hi all,
First of all if the post / reply box isn't working for you make sure you pick-up the latest Javascript files by pressing CTRL+F5 (in Firefox) or Shift+F5 (in IE) to fully reload the page.
Ok here is what's new:
Enhanced Post / Reply Boxes
Text Selection
You can now select text within the post/reply box, click a tag and have it wrap it properly. This worked before in IE but not in Firefox, now it works in both.
From anywhere on the page ...
However.. you can also select text from ANYWHERE ON THE PAGE and then the 'quote', 'image' and 'link' buttons will still work. So you can now high-light someones message, click 'quote' and it'll copy the whole lot into the text area for you.
Automagic URLs
If you select a URL (either in the textarea or on the page) and hit 'link' it will automatically turn it into a link for you. It detects text that starts with http:// or www. Highlight the following, hit 'link' and see what I mean:
http://www.google.com
www.google.com
If the text you selected isn't a URL, it'll prompt you to enter the URL and then wrap the URL around whatever text you did select.
and Images
The above works for images too. If you select a URL ending with a valid image resource (gif, jpg, png) it'll image link it automatically for you. Again you can select this text from anywhere on the page or in the textarea.
If it's not an image it'll prompt you for the URL to it.
Test on this:
http://forum.thegamecreators.com/g/richav1.gif
(Note: It's very easy to select an extra space at the end of a URL, so I'm going to trim them away in the next update to make it a bit more friendly)
New Smiley Range
Previously each smiley face was a single GIF file. This meant you had to load in about 40 or so images just for the smiley bar, each time.
I replaced those 40+ images with one single GIF that is also an image map. So, you get more smilies to choose from (without hitting the more link) and it takes up less bandwidth, and less requests to the server. Well, I like it anyway
Source Code Gone
The 'source' option has been removed for now. It didn't work when you were still hit with the noob badge and had to have a post approved. It also took up more room. I will bring it back once it works, and probably tab it off, so you can select to see it if you wish.
toggle it
Top right of all messages is a toggle link. Use it to hide messages where some spoon posted an image of their 1900x1200 desktop, or some such act of similar intelligence.
but single tags jump to the end!
True. If you click a single tag button (b, u, etc)
with nothing selected it appends the opening tag to the end of whatever is in the textarea, and doesn't place it where-ever your cursor last was. Deal with it I'm afraid, phpbb does the same thing
I believe I have a solution for this in Gecko based browsers, but I've yet to find one that works solidly in IE (if you know of a forum where this isn't the case, post it here and I'll rip the code apart to find out how they do it). The fact the textarea scrolls back up to the start when you wrap text with a tag is most annoying. All I do is set focus on it, but it happens regardless. Annoyingly IE doesn't do this, only Firefox does. Again if you know a fix, tell me (you won't notice it happen unless you enter enough text to make the textarea scroll)
Threads you've written in
All the database tables for 'what threads have I written in' have been built.. which took the forum offline for a few hours today as my scripts parsed 3.5 million records. Still, it's done now. I will release this next week at some point (providing nothing gets in the way)
There are some other small updates coming shortly, but nothing particularly massive, these were mostly to fix some annoying issues that were bugging me, most else I can live with (bar the 'apostrophe vanishing' one)
Cheers,
Rich
Bite my shiny metal ass
