Question

i have coded a forum and now im going to code the post a thread part.

i wonder how i shall proceed from here. i want it to be like Stackoverflow where you have some buttons above the textbox where you can click for different thing you want to insert eg. “hyperlink”, “image”, “code sample”, “numbered list”, “bulleted list” and so on.

are these free scripts or do you code them yourself?

and if the latter, are there some guides for this?

Answer 1

I assume you mean the various editing possibilities to the top of the input field.

These are components that you can download and integrate into your own scripts. No need to necessarily code those from scratch. They are mostly based on pure JavaScript and do not require any specific server side language. Many can be loaded on top of a standard textarea.

Stack Overflow uses markdown as editing language. The closest (in editing capabilitles) freely available control for markdown I can find is wmd. There are also full-blown WYSIWYG editors out there like CKEditor.