Character Quick Select popup

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.