After my showcase interview went live at expressionengine.com I received two tweets asking if I would share the code behind the chat application built for the site. Note that this is completely unsupported, and was written in about 5 hours in the middle of the night by another team member, not me. You may have to go into some of the code to set the admin password, and change the session name used to store the data. Also note that this isn't a normal chat room, it's meant to provide a 1 on 1 chat with someone on the other end (access the admin area by going to /chat/admin.php). It would be good for a customer support chat application, but not for allowing all your site visitors to chat amongst themselves. I've included a simple plugin that should let you embed the chat window into your EE template: exp:chat. This plugin was a stripped down version of a more robust one coded to include other external feeds into the District202 site, so the plugin included is actually untested, but should work. See some screen shots: Client side Admin sideDownload EE_Chat
Posted on: Friday, June 19, 2009