Hi Graeme
I thought I should respond here as my handle has been mentioned a few times.
First, Im using 3.0 still. One project to finish and then I will be upgrading. Point is, I know nothing about 3.1 and where to put what.
But, I do use Ajax throughout my apps. I have embedded what I need in my templates and phprunner generates it all for me.
thesofa has pointed you to one of my examples. I also you it to retrieve inventory and price tables when a user creates a new invoice. BUT the best feature I find, while you are on any of my list pages, clicking on a row opens a centered div and ajax loads the edit/add/view form accord to security. While on this centered div, you can still click rows behind on the main list and ajax refreshes the centered div. This is cool. Most users freak when they leave the list, although they can go right back to it.
It was a bit of a challenge to learn what ajax does, but once you get a handle on it, its a very useful tool for me anyway.
One last point, a site for great ajax tools, menu scripts and such is www.dhtlmgoodies.com. Their scripts work, their clean and very crossbrowser supported. I have had some experience with dynamicDrive, but I find the scripts are not as clean and not very crossbrowser friendly. I have tried their ajax modal, and a couple of their menu scripts. Look nice, easy to implement, but -
If you have one working, try hitting the CTRL + keys. This automatically adjust the webpage to bigger fonts. I found that hitting CTRL + a few times with a menu open, It gets to look pretty ugly. Text flows out of menu boxes and the placement of the submenus goes all screwy. CTRL - keys will shrink the page.
I found with dhtmlgoodies script, most of them are coded in a way that screen size or text size does not affect them negatively.
That's just my experieince with DynamicDrive, its a nice site and lots of valuable information for the extra stuff one needs.
Im rambling, ajax is possible implement, but if you can, I would wait till the folks get ajax working within phprunner. Then Im sure you wont have to hack up the code as I have done.
I have a timeline on a project that is priority for me for the next few weeks so I cannot volunteer my help at this time as I have no time. Dont you just love computers sometimes. I hope this may help you in your research. If you do decide to you some of dhtmlgoodies ajax or menu scripts, I could send you the pages I use them as examples. But again, all this is done in 3.0 so I wouldnt want to waste any of your time as I am sure it will all be different in 3.1 and the new smarty template stuff.