101-Chat Facility

Bitweaver has a basic shoutbox facility which allows a communal instant chat facility between users of a site, this was ported from the original tiki/shoutbox and has very limited filtering and management facilities.

Also available from tiki in the past was Chat but this is no longer available being nominally replaced by the minichat module. The chat pakage was ported to bitweaver as chatterbox but this uses javascript libraries that are not compatible with the current bootstrap/jsquery client base.

Part of the reason that direct instant chat is not perhaps as necessary as it was in the past is the common use of instant messaging via Yahoo/Google/Facebook and other similar on-line chat services. Many of us still use the original chat service - Internet Relay Chat (IRC) but like many of the services, this is a communal serv ice rather than one to one convrsations. It may however be more practical to provide access to one of these services rather than providing a private system drectly on the website.

An alternative cummunications channel is to use private messages much like sms messaging on a mobile phone, and linking with that may be an eventual target, however the most requested facility is which will provide that communications channel via an on screen pop-up. We are currently looking into the options for this.

Open Source Packages

phpFreeChat - multi-user chat room based. Single user messages not currently supported.

PHPOpenChat - Typical google. This has not been updated since 2005 so probably not worth investigating ... register_globals no longer exists in PHP anyway.

livehelperchat - looking more like I want to have, but does not seem to be easy to integrate with bitweaver.

helpcenterlive - looked good, except the chat is a third party service and not part of the software.

LiveAdmin - Lite version is free, but missed that it's code is not open source. Basic functions are good, but need to be able to edit code.

Commercial Packages

In general commertial packages have some sort of self advertising built in which has to be licenced to remove.

phponlinechat - Lincence per operator with hosted service.

LiveZilla - Includes support question ticketing system in addition to live chat, but let down by the fact it will only work on WIndows. It does provide a good demo of what would be useful to have features wise.

Change of tack ...

Since we already have a managed database with private messaging available, augmenting that with a different front end to the shoutbox facility. This will require a lot less work since it will work with the existing infrastructure, so all that is required is a convenient jquery compatible pop-up interface. A recent short list of possible options is provided at sitepoint but even this is now out of date. It does however provide a couple of useful starting points.

fancybox - One of the js libraries for creating pop-up windows.

candy - Chats are not dead yet - Simple XMPP based chatroom system that does support private messages.

css-tricks - Building a jQuery/PHP Powered Chat Room, a useful quick start guide

What is needed?

The main problem with all of the options tried so far is that they tend to assume that agents are available to chat all the time. Since most sites will only be supported during normal office hours, outside those hours the chat facility needs to revert to the normal messaging system. Since we are running everything through the website, the traditional email messages could be replaced with automatic messages on the chat system. This will depend on how messages are to be handled out of hours.

When someone comes onto a site during the live period, a prompt to ask if someone can help may replace to message recorder. This needs staff available to answer each visitor, or if 'everybody' is busy, a "someone will be with you shortly". The candy interface looks like the best way for someone to handle several visitors at once, but it does ot seem to be the easiest to modify since the processing is done in the browser rather than on the web server. So need to test the options with this.

Rather than the text file based logging of messages it makes sense to store all of these in the database and this will allow searching for previous visitors and building statistics on who has been helped.

Fork the shoutbox package as a base for a personal chat package. chatterbox is an alternative, but since shoutbox already has a module interface it looks easier to build on.