It took me a few hours on Saturday and a few more on Sunday, but I’m ready to announce our coolest new feature: The Character Quick Select popup!
The old way
One complaint we heard long ago was that it was a real pain to be writing a wiki page and want to reference a character. You’d have to open another browser window, navigate to the characters tab, and look up the slug or ID of the character in order to link them. To fix this, we added the sidebar with the dropdown box containing all your characters.
This was a decent solution, but I was never pleased with it. For one, it’s cumbersome if there are a lot of characters. Plus, it doesn’t help when you’re busy writing and want to define a brand new NPC. This happens to me A LOT when I’m planning out an adventure or new area.
The new way
To help with this process, I’ve revamped the lookup process to be much friendlier, and moved it to the textarea toolbar.
Simply click the little character-in-a-folder button, and voila! You’re looking at the new quick select popup.
New Characters
You can create a new NPC for your campaign, right from here. No more need to go add them via the characters tab then come back to where you were editing. Click the New Character button, fill out the basics, click save, and your new character is added to the list, ready for immediate insertion into your post.
Filtering
Just start typing a character’s name or a tag. As you type, the list will automatically filter itself to the characters you’re looking for.
Insert
Found the character you’re looking for? Click the Insert button to insert the link tag right into the post.
Known Issue
There is one main irritating bug that I’m aware of. Sometimes the textarea you were originally editing loses the place of the cursor. When you click the button to insert a character, the wiki tag is inserted at the start of the textarea, instead of where the cursor was originally. This is a limitation of how textareas work, but I’ll see if I can find some sort of workaround.
Like it? Hate it?
I’m very proud of the quick select popup, as I’ve needed it many times in the past. Let me know what you think, and if there are any ways it could be improved.
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It sounds great… can’t wait to try it!
That’s a very good idea! Well done!
Nice!
SO. AWESOME.
Indeed, is a really good update. That way you can write and add not just existing characters but create new ones without leaving the main editing page!
And for the bug, well I bet you can fix it, but I don’t think is that bad, I mean, have you ever tried to input an image at Blogger? is a pain in the ***.
This works very well. Are there plans to add a similar pop-up for wiki entries? You run into a similar problem if your wiki is very large.
I’d love to do something similar for the wiki entries. I just need to get some time and inspiration.
While very, very awesome – it’s not on the toolbar for character creation pages! So if you want to link to another character, you have to type the full thing, because the drop down’s gone, too.
Good call about it missing on the character editing. I’ll add that.
Liked the idea. Used it. Now I love it.
Make it so for wiki entries as well!
Compliment sandwich.
I love Obsidian Portal and can’t imagine gaming without it anymore.
I HATE it when you add a new feature and disable the old way, this new pop up takes load time while the drop down doesn’t. I preferred the drop down for speed. I just wish we could have had both systems.
I love how Obsidian Portal isn’t stagnant, innovating new features breaths new life into the site.
Rob,
It is a little slow on first load, since it has to pull the data from the server, but after that it’s pretty quick. If you close the window and re-open, it’s right there again.
Plus, the insta-filtering saves me a ton of time in finding and inserting the characters I need. Time spent vs time lost, the new way wins hands-down in my case.
LOVE this completely. I used to wish that there was something exactly like this in those moments of aggravation when I could not remember for the life of me what one of my characters’ slugs were or wanted to make a new one. Job well done; one more reason to love ObsidianPortal
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