Add to a page without refreshing
 

Right now I'm playing around with PHP scripting and web design in general, and I was just wondering what I'd need to do this. I've seen that the Gamingforce forums have this feature where you can post using the Quick Post or edit your post, and rather than reloading the page it'll simply display a text box (and vice versa when you submit). Can this be accomplished with pure PHP or would I need to use something else?

The project I'm working on (self-assigned) is a sort of Internet Role-playing Tabletop. Right now I'm trying to design a system where the GM or admin can design character sheets for whatever rule set they're using (whether it's D&D or something else). So it would be nice if I could set up a "project page" where they can use buttons, boxes, menus, etc. to define the aspects of their sheets before saving to an XML template. It'd be a pain if they had to reload the entire page every time they altered something, so I'd like to know how I can do this as cleanly as possible.

I should also note that I'm currently looking up how to do this on my own, but I would appreciate some advice as to what is the more web-friendly approach.

It's called AJAX. It's a not a new language or anything, it's actually a combined use of several different ones, the biggest being PHP and Javascript. Data from the client computer is streamed invisibly to the server and back again to the client.

Unfortunately, that's about as far as my knowledge of web languages go. Try looking up Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX
The "See Also" portion should provide a better understand of the technicalities.

W3Schools.com seems to be a good resource for learning web languages. I've been messing around with Javascript, but now it seems I need to take a look at some others. The summary at the end of the Javascript section points to DHTML and ASP, two terms I've seen mentioned in a lot of my job searches. :) Guess I better get cracking.