In place editing is a great way to enhance user interface when dynamically changing data on a page. Scriptaculous’ In Place Editor is a nice extension with extensive set of features and options. I recently needed such functionality in one of the projects, but IPE wasn’t exactly the best tool for the job. The idea was to let users select one of the predefined options as well as add their own. GMail chat widget and the way it allows to change availability status is a great example of such user interface addition. Another concern was to make control fit in a limited space - google simply gets rid of “Save”/”Cancel” buttons and saves value of the input field when clicking outside of control. I tried duplicating this behavior into a simple prototype based script which can be simply plugged into any project. This work is experimental (there are couple of known issues) and I would appreciate any feedback.