Sure, here's a basic guide to how I do it. On the page plugin you can just send an AJAX request to the same page and handle it in the PHP. You don't necessarily have to use a form. I use this jQuery:
<script>
$.ajax({
type: 'post',
data: { ajax_add_message: "the text" },
success: function(response) {
// do processing here
}
});
</script>
Note, you'd normally put that in some kind of event handler, for example in place of the ... in $('#something').click( function() { ... }); Or maybe inside a form submission handler.
Next, in the PHP you can arrange your process_request function like this:
function process_request($request)
{
$message = qa_post_text('ajax_add_message');
if ( !empty($message) )
{
// we received an AJAX request
echo 'Success!';
return;
}
// otherwise, this is a normal page request
$qa_content = qa_content_prepare();
$qa_content['title'] = 'Page title';
// rest of the page stuff here, including the JS above
return $qa_content;
}
OK so here we check for the variable sent via AJAX, ajax_add_message. If it exists then we do some processing and output a string of text, which is what gets put in the response variable in the Javascript.
That's the basic shell, hopefully it will help you! If you have any questions feel free to ask and I'll try and answer :)
