jQuery to post data without leaving page & textarea?

Hi,

I have been looking at code for hours and cannot seem to solve this one myself, or fully understand what I should be doing based on all of the FAQ and tutorials.

I am using jQuery to POST without leaving the page based on this tutorial, http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/javas ... ng-jquery/

Although when I try and pull the data from the text area (which CKEditor is wrapped around via the class), no content is passed through.

I am guessing this is due to the content actually being stored within the CKEditors instance, and not on the actual page.

So I tried to all the following code to my jQuery code, to no avail.

var editor = $('.jquery_ckeditor').ckeditorGet();
alert( editor.checkDirty() );

// Get the editor data.
var data = $( 'textarea.editor' ).val();

For reference, here is the section (which needs adapting - but im unsure how) that will pull the content from an 'input' field, but not a 'textarea' (with CKEditor class)

   var messagecontent = $("input#messagecontent").val();
   if (messagecontent == "" ) {
   $("label#messagecontent_error").show();
   $("label#messagecontent").focus();
   return false;
   }

I am in the very early stages of trying to understand JavaScript / jQuery / CKEditor so any pointers on this issue would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Michael