In the third look at the new Text Editor functionality coming soon to IP Board and subsequently TIWWA, chief programmer Matt Mecham reveals more about the cool new features that we can look forward to seeing later this year...

This entry rounds up our series of blogs on the new text editor and how we've enhanced other areas of the interface that use it. I recently introduced the new text editor and then showed you some basic integration such as fast reply and instant quote.

I want to now show you the last piece of this feature set and resolve a common issue when making a reply. Quite often you're on a busy board such as ours and you're using the fast reply to make a post and when submit the post you realise that others have posted in the mean time making your reply either redundant or out of context.

To solve this, IP.Board now checks at regular intervals to see if any new posts have come through and if so, you can add them to the page.

This screen shot shows the inline notification stating that there are new replies. Clicking on the link adds the replies into the topic.

This video shows the system working. Note, for this demo I increased the polling frequency to every few seconds.

So how does it work? Will it crash my server?

It's a bit clever and no! When you start typing you trigger the polling action which checks every 3 minutes for new posts. This is a very fast and light query that requires far fewer resources than a simple page refresh. It will continue polling until you either add the reply or an hour has passed. We added this upper limit to prevent instances where a reply is started but then the member changes tabs, etc.

I hope you enjoy this feature and all the new functionality we've added in this crucial area. Making posts is the very lifeblood of your forum and making it easier to contribute can only increase the number of posts made.