Phase 1 Implementing the frontend of the module
This includes detecting @ character, displaying an auto-suggest dropdown and replacing the searched username phrase by the selected username from the auto suggest list.
Some of the external libraries considered for achieving this behaviour -
- At.js Depends on caret.js, compatible with textarea as well as content-editable document elements. For more features visit https://github.com/ichord/At.js#user-co ... es-preview. But one of the drawbacks with At.js is its heavy codebase that is not favorable to integrate in the current PhpBB codebase. Official repo for At.js - https://github.com/ichord/At.js
- Mention.js - The biggest advantage of mention.js is that it almost covers everything we need for the frontend of our project and besides that it is very lightweight due to which it can be easily modified according to the project's needs. Some of the things needed to be changed are - autosuggest should be purely based on phpbb Usernames and not personal names. Besides, that username wrapped around which can be achieved by modifying the _updater function in mention.js file. For official codebase visit - https://github.com/jakiestfu/Mention.js/.