[pmwiki-users] Simple AJAX chat?

[kirpi at kirpi.it]

> >  Rene Visco:
> >  Is there a chat feature in Pmwiki? Wonder if it's possible to use the
> >  simple chat features in PMWiki?
> >
> >  I work at a Deaf school where teachers would love to have chat features in
> our intranet so they can document their students' informal writing skills.

> Oliver Betz:
> but why should this be integrated in a wiki?

I've successfully being using a chat inside the wiki intranet at the office.
I managed to set a tiny tagboard which floats at the lower left corner
of the screen, right inside the sidebar.
This way all the people at the offices (we have many branches in many
countries) are constantly in contact: such a tool proved to be useful
not also to the business itself, but also to better strenghten
positive relations between people, thus helping building better
cooperation.

It was useful to have the chat wrapped "inside" the wiki, in that only
those people who pass wiki id and password authentication are shown
the intranet pages *and* the chat.

As I'm *not* a computer expert (quite the opposite!), all I could do
was to set a small floating iframe and insert a ready-made chat inside
it.
I used http://www.venturenine.com/Solutions/le/ and managed to
automatically set the name field gathering the id from the wiki
authorization system.
On the whole it seems practical and safe. The only (discovered) issue
is that, in Opera, when the session times out the wiki pages are not
visible any mone *but* the chat is.

If I had to rebuild the site, I would use http://www.phpfreechat.net/ now.

For a pure "wiki" chat, you might want to explore
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/ZAP but I personally missed to
find a useful working demo of it (my fault, for sure).

As far as my limited experience goes chats are a very useful tools.
And, which is more, they wonderfully integrate with and complement
wikis where cooperation is the goal.

I hope one day some coder will be willing to set a standalone chat recipe.

Luigi