Chat_XH – a CMSimple_XH Plugin

Speech bubbles

Chat_XH facilitates to have an arbitrary amount of simple chat rooms or shoutboxes on your website. Users that are logged in via Memberpages_XH or Register_XH are recognized as such; other visitors can send messages anonymously.

Please do read this documentation, before you encounter any problems!

Important Notice

Chat_XH hasn't been tested so far in various environments. It is a so called release candidate. Use with caution!

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Requirements

Chat_XH is a plugin for CMSimple_XH. It requires CMSimple_XH ≥ 1.6 and PHP ≥ 5.1.2.

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Installation

The installation is done as with many other CMSimple_XH plugins. See the CMSimple_XH wiki for further details.

  1. Backup the data on your server.
  2. Unzip the distribution on your computer.
  3. Upload the whole directory chat/ to your server into CMSimple_XH's plugins directory.
  4. Set write permissions to the subdirectories config/, css/ and languages/.
  5. Switch to "Chat" in the back-end to check if all requirements are fulfilled.
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Settings

The plugin's configuration is done as with many other CMSimple_XH plugins in the website's back-end. Select Plugins → Chat.

You can change the default settings of Chat_XH under "Config". Hints for the options will be displayed when hovering over the help icon with your mouse.

Localization is done under "Language". You can translate the character strings to your own language, if there is no appropriate language file available, or customize them according to your needs.

The look of Chat_XH can be customized under "Stylesheet".

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Usage

Embedding of a chat room on a page is done with the following plugin call:

{{{chat('%CHAT_ROOM%', %PURGE_TIME%);}}}

To embed a chat room in the template, insert:

<?php echo chat('%CHAT_ROOM%', %PURGE_TIME%);?>
%CHAT_ROOM%
The name of the chat. It can be choosen arbitrarily, but may contain only lowercase alphanumeric characters (a-z and 0-9) and hyphens.
%PURGE_TIME%
The time in seconds after which an inactive chat will be purged. "0" means: keep entries forever. This argument is optional; if it is omitted (including the leading comma), the default is taken from the configuration.

Examples:

{{{chat('chat');}}}
{{{chat('chat17');}}}
{{{chat('quick-chat', 120);}}}
{{{chat('shoutbox', 0);}}}

You can embed as many chat rooms on any single page as you like—they're working independent of each other as long as they have different names.

After a configurable time of inactivity (i.e. no new messages are posted), the chat history will be purged automatically.

If you want to edit the chat data files, you have to do this via FTP.

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Limitations

If JavaScript or Cookies are disabled in the visitor's browsers, or in case the browser doesn't support the required JavaScript (e.g. IE 7 and older), the automatic retrieval of new messages doesn't work. Instead the visitor has to refresh his browser to see them.

Displaying the currently logged in users is not yet implemented. For a workaround regarding Memberpages_XH see the CMSimple_XH Forum.

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License

Chat_XH is licensed under GPLv3.

© 2012-2015 Christoph M. Becker

Czech translation © 2012 Josef Němec
Slovak translation © 2012 Dr. Martin Sereday

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Credits

Chat_XH was inspired by scriptshow's MiniChat.

The plugin icon is designed by Alessandro Rei. Many thanks for publishing this icon under GPL.

This plugin uses free applications icons from Aha-Soft. Many thanks for making these icons freely available.

Many thanks to the community at the CMSimple_XH forum for tips, suggestions and testing. Particularly I want to thank snafu for giving the first feedback.

And last but not least many thanks to Peter Harteg, the "father" of CMSimple, and to all developers of CMSimple_XH without whom this amazing CMS wouldn't exist.

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