Saving (Updating) Post / Page Edits With AJAX

One of the major frustrations while editing posts/pages is that after saving, two things happen:

  • The admin page is reloaded, which takes time
  • More importantly, the cursor position is lost

If you’re working on longer posts — especially when copy-editing, or if working in HTML mode and making small adjustments where frequent previews are needed — losing the current position, then finding the point where you left off is unnecessarily frustrating and time-consuming.

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An elegant solution to this problem would be if the updates would be done over AJAX. Actually there used to be a plugin for this, but it hasn’t been updated in over 5 years and it doesn’t work with current WP versions anymore.

Is there an (easy) way to either:

  • Fix that plugin, or
  • Hack `post.php` to add a working “AJAX Save” button?

Interestingly, WordPress already has an AJAX update functionality which it uses when Auto-Saving. Perhaps that could be starting point?

I truly believe this is an important UX issue and would greatly appreciate your help. Thank you!

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1 comment

  1. The german (core) developer Dominik Schilling/ocean90 has released a pretty nice, simple and small plugin to encounter (part of) this problem. Instead of adding a complex AJAX save process, that would just make it harder to work with even handlers and such (de- & re-registering them), he just added a position marker, that allows WP to determine your current position after a save process and scroll back to it.

    You can download the plugin over the official repo.