Ok, I want to write this extension myself, but I'm leaving the country and will have limited internet access in less than 3 weeks, so I wanted to get the idea out there in case someone else was interested in writing it.
It'd be really nice if, when selecting HTML, Markdown, or BBCode formatting, a little box of quicklinks could pop-up to allow easy insertion of formatting tags. I know this is one of those things that people found made other forums bloated, but without even a quick reference of any kind, Joe Schmo user has no idea how to format things using Markdown, BBCode, or HTML. Even a quick reference static list would be handy, but I figured... if we're going to put that in, might as well make it clickable to toss the code inside the comment box, right?
Ideally, I'd like to see this done a la Wordpress, where if you just click the quicklink for the tag, it will insert the opening tag where the cursor is. If you click it again, it will insert the close tag where the cursor is. If you highlight text and click a quicklink, it will nest the text within those tags. This code could probably be theived outright from WordPress... (it's open-source, right? I could be wrong) but it only has support for HTML, so we'd need to modify it to support Markdown and BBCode as well.
I'm willing to help out on this for the two-weeks-ish I have left with regular access, but after that, my ability to contribute will be sporadic at best.
if it'll help anyone get this done we have menu's that do exacly this on Planet-Tolkien and you can find the javascript file that runs the menu's here textbox.js and the images here bb_code.rar the .js files seem to have originated from www.subblue.com. If that works properly all that would need to be is build the extention framework - that i have no idea how to do!
If there are any files i've forgotten drop me an e-mail and put up some links.