The mentions plugin supports this out of the box. The feature is just a big buggy on some editors. For example on CKEditor, the current implementation works only with the first paragraph of the content.

oh ok, i thought i had seen it on my site before at one point. i am using mentions 1.9 in elgg 1.12.x here and for me the dropdown does not appear in tinyMCE regardless of what i have done to attempt to get it to render.

I can  remember a few years ago working on a project like that on Elgg 1.8. However, I stopped working on the project because my schedule changed due to family, school, and work. Try this https://github.com/Twizanex/Mention.js

The demo is located here http://jakiestfu.github.io/Mention.js/

Also, try this one https://github.com/Twizanex/jquery-textcomplete

Then, try this one too: https://github.com/Twizanex/At.js

I know there are a few plugins here at elgg community already that work partially on this subject but adding more tools to your site members does not hurt...

there is already a mention plugin that is labelled as elgg core for 1.12 elgg and i am using it. it appears to need some fixes.

@ura soul, That is correct. Perhaps also the mention plugin can in-corporate the Draft.js too in order to improve user's experience on elgg based sites. For more information read this  https://github.com/Twizanex/draft-js

The Demo is here: https://facebook.github.io/draft-js/

However, I still like CKEditor as compared to Draft.js version.

i am using tinyMCE here, so that is more relevant to me. i looked through the code for the mentions plugin and found that it is likely that it needs to be updated for compatibility with tinyMCE.

There are some open PR in the mentions plugin repo that might improve compatibility also with tinymce. Maybe it helps to use the code of these PRs to get it fully working.

thanks. i just looked through them though and didn't see anything that appears to help tinyMCE.

i opened a ticket for this issue with tinyMCE and some introductory findings for the issue are in the comments: https://github.com/Elgg/mentions/issues/38

I thought issue https://github.com/Elgg/mentions/pull/32 was also about getting it to work with tinymce. By coincidence this issue was closed just yesterday and I was quite confused at first when it didn't show up in the list of open issues anymore. But the tinymce support was added by https://github.com/Elgg/mentions/pull/33. I've tried it with my extended_tinymce plugin yesterday but haven't got it working reliable yet. Maybe it works with the former Elgg core tinymce plugin (don't know if this one is running with tinymce v4 already though). Problem I currently have with extended_tinymce and mentions plugins is that both use an AMD module (though extended_tinymce also uses inline code for the activity page and ajax views) and the mentions code fails to work if extended_tinymce hasn't initialized the editor yet.

i found that by increasing the delay on the timeout in mentions' autocomplete.js file, i could stop the initial JS error that appeared to relate to tinyMCE not being initialised - however, the keyup event was constantly being identified as not available.. so maybe that is also due to tinyMCE not being fully loaded yet.

i thought it would just be a case of adding a require statement to the mentions code to require extended_tinymce if tinymce is being used - though my quick experiment with that did not succeed.