Highlight feature for selected words like Medium

Developer help
1

Hi Everyone
I’ve been trying to implement a highlight selection feature like Medium.
As you know, in Medium when we select the line, there’s a popup and we can highlight the selection.

Is there any feature like this or is there anyway to easily coordinate this feature?

Best
Khanh

1 Like
2

I second this request. To be able to offer highlights as a way for members to save stuff would make Ghost Members completely off the rails amazing.

Benefits would include:

  • prompting new members to sight up to save their highlights.
  • encouraged social sharing
  • new ways to offer value to customers if they can save snippets in their account
1 Like
3

Is there any solution?

4

I guess you are after technology like: Selection API

You would have to nut out the full requirement - e.g.

  1. you only want this for logged-in members?
  2. each member would be able to manage their own highlights ( e.g. delete) - needs a UI?
  3. can anyone see highlights from other members?
  4. are one-word highlights actually tags?
  5. you would have to figure out how / where to persist / store each members highlight details
  6. what happens when an article is amended - does the highlight just store the position, or does it save part/all of the text?
  7. etc etc

Would you build this as a separate service that a user can apply on any website? That would require a browser extension - has anyone already done that?

Sounds like an interesting project :)
@duy_khanh_nguyen - can you share what you have working so far?

5

Thanks for your reply @jeff

  1. I only want this for logged-in members like what Medium does.
  2. Each member would be able to manage their own highlights, yes.

Those two are what I’m expecting and the rest of them are optional.
So basically what I needed is the highlight feature like Medium. At the first time, I was going to implement it by using local storage or cache ( to keep the highlighted info ) but I noticed Medium keeps the highlighted information on the database.

So to implement this feature with Ghost blog, I need to configure the database, make the API endpoints (GraphQL), etc.
I hope to get this feature implemented by Ghost team as it’s very useful feature and highlighting is one of the most important feature from Medium ( competitor of Ghost ).