Auto-saving in TinyMCE editor

[Kristina Hoeppner]

It would be good if text could be auto-saved in the visual editor TinyMCE to avoid accidental text losses when switching between windows and when Mahara times out but the text is not finished. A user doesn't know what the timeout time is and thus couldn't - even if they wished - be mindful about it.

Apparently, TinyMCE has a plugin that saves text automatically: http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=14352 -> We'd have to check if it is still works and what else is needed from the Mahara side.

[Jono M (jonom)]

There's a newer and (probably) better plugin for TinyMCE 4: https://github.com/valtlfelipe/TinyMCE-LocalAutoSave
Would be worth looking into if we first upgrade TinyMCE ...

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

There is a link to the plugin mentioned by Jono at https://www.tinymce.com/docs/plugins/autosave/

If you enable the plugin it will record your input every 30 secs (or specified time) to local storage or session storage and there is a restore draft button added allowing you to restore the information or you can set a variable to allow it to restore automatically on page load

Here's a demo of the TinyMCE autosave plugin: http://valtlfelipe.github.io/TinyMCE-LocalAutoSave/

There are two types of webstorage for html5, one is sessionStorage and the other is localStorage. The localStorage object stores the data with no expiration date. The data will not be deleted when the browser is closed. SessionStorage is not recommended in your case because everything would be gone when the session is lost, i.e. a timeout occurs.