You mean you need to know a manner in which it should be presented?
Yes, the user interface. The underlying idea; text macros as are seen in most decent text editors is straightforward enough. Figuring out how to lay the thing out on the page so it's intuitive, unobtrusive and maximally useful is more challenging IMO.
Well, I can do that. The macro system should input user formatting and other data at the push of a button into the text field for easy DJ formatting. This would start out with the user initially inputting the data somehow, perhaps the same basic way that you input news into the ticker, if possible, and on the user initiating the macro function it would draw that data, process it (perhaps to insert date information or other basic variables), and insert it into the text field, perhaps in the same way smilies are inserted when you click on them.
As for the storing of the data, perhaps it would be possible to store it in a database somewhere and have a php function draw it and generate a js script with that information inside of variables? I don't know what the limitations of the forum system are, so I can't give an exact thing.
That's more or less how it has to be done--there is a difference from smilies and bbcode however--some (but not all) of that is stored in the database as is (I mean the uninterpreted text from the post) and the interpretation actually done when someone views the post. (Which is why you can quote and still see the tags.) In this case the interpretation would have to be done first--because not everyone would "speak" the same tags.
In other words we're speaking of something like a preprocessor here, which is unique to each user. But regardless, the main challenge is still figuring how to lay out the GUI.
So, would the XMMP be able to serve as a more capable system to replace the AJAX chat at some future point? Most importantly, would it, without imposing significant load on the server, operate under high chat loads without lagging, and would it be easily extensible for our chat mods?
Indeed--on all counts; that is specifically what it was designed for. It's a real-time messaging protocol that should be blazingly fast and light on resources. In addition, there are many free external clients members could use to more conveniently chat on mobile devices (or simply to have chat in a separate program on their PCs.) One could instantly start a private chat with one or more members, or join a public room.
The only thing I'm not sure of is how easily mods can be created for it. I need to do more reading, but it
sounds like it's readily extensible. Don't get your hopes up too much yet--it might be awhile.
Edit: It's XMPP, by the way; not XMMP. My fault.
Although maybe it
should be the later here..
