Jeditable and admin-ajax.php in WordPress

Jeditable is an awesome in-line editor plugin for jQuery. I was trying to use it with WordPress the other day and I had a little trouble that went like this.

A basic invocation of Jeditable is for example:


$('.edit').editable('http://www.example.com/save.php', {
"callback": function( sValue, y ) {
alert("callback");
},
"submitdata": function ( value, settings ) {
return {
"action": 'edit_item'
};
}
});


The first argument is the URL or function to send the edited content to. The problem when using this with WordPress is that you will end up with a separated file (the save.php) that will be isolated from the WordPress environment. Wouldn’t it be better to run this as a normal WordPress AJAX call?

To use this with WordPress you just need to use as a target the wp-admin/admin-ajax.php and have the action name in the submitdata, e.g.:


$('.edit').editable( '/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php', {
"callback": function( sValue, y ) {
alert("callback");
},
"submitdata": function ( value, settings ) {
return {
"action": 'edit_item'
};
}
} );


Then you can define that AJAX action and access everything on the WordPress side (database, etc).