Posted by michelle on September 18, 2007 at 7:12pm
I'd like to have a native Drupal chat solution on my site but the chatroom module seems so complicated. All I want is one page with one site-wide chat with everyone in the same room. I'd like a block to go along with this to say who's chatting so I can see if someone joins when I'm not looking at that tab. Anyone working on something like this? I don't have the js/flash/ajax/dohicky skills to make it myself, unfortunately, so I'm hoping there's one somewhere that I'm just not seeing. Otherwise I guess I'll go with PHPFreechat if it ever gets updated as that's the closest to what I want.
Thanks,
Michelle
Comments
It sounds like Chatroom is a
It sounds like Chatroom is a good fit for what you need right now.
Fortunately an effort to get phpFreeChat updated was announced recently at http://groups.drupal.org/node/6070
It is?
I looked at chatroom around a month ago and it didn't look anything like what I wanted. I only tried the demo, though, didn't install it. Maybe I should try it again.
I saw that note about PHPFreeChat but there hasn't been any further updates. Not coming out before Drupalcon, I know that much.
Michelle
Sound familliar
Looks like I'm looking for exactly the same thing:
- a page with one site-wide chat with everyone in the same room,
- old chat inputs pushed out of history limited by size (instead of timer),
- access right management by role,
- a block showing who is chatting.
And I am in the same position:
- I don't have the necessary skills to do it myself.
I have tried out almost half a dozen chat modules, all with fancy gizmos, and so far none replied to theses simples requirements.
The most promising where:
- PHPFreeChat : looked like to be the nearest to meet theses requirements buts doesn't work with my provider (flock is not permitted)...
- ChatRoom : works but the philosophy behind it’s development looks to be quite different.
I’m screwed.
you can now embed google
you can now embed google talk or meebo on your site. might not meet your all requirements, but maybe good enough.
Native Drupal chat solution ?
I doubt that google talk and meebo provides a native Drupal chat solution but I'll get a closer look (If you have precise links...)
The whole idea is to allow registered user to chat without the requirement of an external "Instant Messaging" program.
For my personal matter, being the admin of a medium sized community, I'd rather prefer not to give my IM contact to all members.
Chatblock looked to be "the" solution but I couldn't get it to work (need some debugging and a stable release)
From what I experimented, my best bet would be to get a look on chatroom code and try to cut out all the multi chat/chatroom and archive code.
Main problems are: time and skills to do that...
What's startle me is that the existing looks either to basic or much more complicated than the "native drupal chat" solution I'm looking for; nothing in the middle.
Funny...
I could have written your post, Jérôme. I'm currently using meebo that Moshe mentioned but really want a native Drupal solution. Key to me is to have something on the sidebar to let me know when someone is in the chat as I don't keep the window open all the time. AFAIK, that's not possible with a 3rd party thing like meebo.
Michelle
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out the Coulee Region
Chatblock
If you want something really simple, try the Chatblock module. All it does is provide a small block where users anywhere on the site can chat. You can limit the amount of messages that show up at once, delete old ones on cron, etc. but there's very little setup involved. You can also choose whether to show user login/logout messages or not.
EDIT: Didn't see Jerome's post. I'm not quite sure why it wouldn't work for you, but it works great for me on both PHP4 and PHP5 with MySQL and Apache/2.
I used ChatBox module
I used ChatBox module (http://drupal.org/project/chatbox) in old 4.7 sites, and it was great. Only the necessary and sufficient features.
It finely fulfills the requirements of one site-wide chat with a block in the sidebar showing who's online and last messages. That block did not have to be updated every 3 seconds or so, which is kind of annoying. The chat opened in a new window (this one was updated each 3 seconds), which allowed people to chat while comfortably browsing other content in the site.
But unfortunately the developers preferred to deprecate it in favor of Chat Room...
If someone had the skills (not my case...) and interest to update it to 5.x/6.x, I'd be more than happy to help testing it.
Talkinator
It's not a Drupal module, but Talkinator looks like a winner to me.
http://talkinator.com/
Chatblock
This is a very simple module, but it has a serious flaw. It uses a full Drupal bootstrap on every message being sent and saved to the database, which can be pretty heavy traffic on some sites (think page reload for every message being sent). I'm not sure how to fix this flaw but it works fine for a small number of users.
Dave
You might simply load a
You might simply load a partial Drupal bootstrap, like the chatroom module does, or write the chat session to a static file that can be served straight from apache.
Aaron Winborn
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