Offer: Gabbly chat extension

akb

Don't know if there's someone who's interested in this. I have coded a quick and dirty extension to integrate a link to a forums Gabbly chat (see http://gabbly.com/yourdomain.com). My first extension and it's working :D Well, it's german only atm, since I hardcoded the two lang strings, but I'll change that tomorrow or something, i think. It's just bit annoying to have the users hardcode the language files to install only such a little extension. Or is there a newer, better way? Well, here it is (all in german atm): http://www.mfkne.de/127/lussumo-vanilla-gabbly-extension

Bergamot

Hmm. On the one hand, I like the general feel of it, but on the other hand I wish it were locally hostable, rather than having to go through gabbly.com

akb

Well, it's just a "cool new ajax (?) thingy". I like it, especially because you can integrate it without a real "integration". It's just to call the URL and that's it. A toy, maybe, but nice I think :-)

lech

Yeah, the major drawback, like Bergamot mentioned is that it's totally 3rd party and not locally hosted. Are they planning to open source this so one can modify and theme it as they like? Other than that, I will say this is a pretty sweet web-app. I visited the main site to see a bunch of people chatting with it and figured I would click a link to get it off of my browser window and it flipped through with it. That alone was pretty sweet, but I could think of a few improvements for it. Then again, extensions are totally optional, so I'll leave it at that :)

akb

hehe. well... at the end its just a try of a first extension and a quick drafted possibility for my community members to have an option to chat. many of them just didnt get irc running, even with a java client :D so i decided to do it that way. our chat wont be that frequented... btw: i updated the extension just few minutes ago. it now uses javascript for the link to prevent a problem with clicking the link twice. for users without javascript this can be disabled in user settings -> app settings (bottom). last but not least i integrated a small readme and the language defaults to english with a few strings at the top of the file that can be edited/translated.

akb

arghl... i forgot that the url to vanilla isnt always the servername/domainname. so if your forum is not directly at http://(xxx).yourdomain.com, the link is not generated correctly. i will fix this later on today i think. sry

Freedman

I spent some time talking to the Gabbly guys the other day and did bring up the thing about it being locally hostable. They suggested I post it on their forum as a request and the more people who do that, the more likely they'll implement it (so maybe go try that out).

akb

sounds interesting... especially with designing own css in mind and so on. thx for the info

EHG

I really like this chat solution and I'm trying it out on our site. Hopefully they'll include the possibility to feed it with a user name and perhaps some kind of logon in the future.

akb>> a vanilla/php-newbie question, in your extention the "start chat" ends up in the menu also for users not logged in. Is there an easy way to only have it in the menu for those who have logged in?

akb

i'll take a look into this tomorrow. i know this plugin has to be worked on and i already got a newer version from my own use, but forgot to put it onto the site *shame on me* tomorrow... :-)

akb

Tomorrow... ha ha. Well, today is tomorrow. So look out for the fixed version ;) A quick and dirty hack to work with Vanilla1, but improved in some other ways too. Version 1.1 (2006-07-23) ----------------------------- * Fixed to work with Vanilla1 (by temporarily removing the user changable JavaScript-option *d’oh*) * Changed Gabbly and Un-Gabbly-URLs to use cookie domain to avoid being logged off by not using www before the domain * Changed the extension to make proper use of language definitions Todo: * Rework the ability of a user to change whether he wants to use JavaScript or not! Download is updated @ my site: http://www.mfkne.de/127/lussumo-vanilla-gabbly-extension

ADM

Put it in the addons repository:
http://lussumo.com/addons/

akb

done. sorry for this, but i didnt know if this keeps sorta quality standards :-)

Bentot

akb... I like this chat thing but my forum is set to private and when I click on Start Chat.. the chat page opens up, leaving the forum. How do you open this chat application on it's own without leaving the Forum? Thanks in advance.

akb

hmmm... what url does it call then? do you have your forums in a subdir of your domain or something like that? since you call the chat app simply by calling http://gabbly.com/www.yoururl.com I have atm set it to open http://gabbly.com/YOUR_VANILLAS_COOKIE_DOMAIN. maybe i should tweak this to call it with the base uri or something, if this doesnt work with subdirs (does COOKIE_DOMAIN contain the installation subdir? *d'oh*).

Bentot

My Forum is in a subdir.. dubdubw.mydomain.com/forum and the forum is private (you need to login) When I click the Start Chat link. It kicks back to http://gabbly.com/www.mydomain. com Maybe if this chat application will popup on it's own window like the MSN Messenger style then it would be perfect.

akb

Well, the way this service works is quite bit different. And from the point that it is designed to be a "chat on and about your website" service, this is okay I think... even if it breaks up with XHTML 1.1 Strict (I think). It loads sorta frameset (or iframe, dont know any more) to embed the chat window _and_ your website. So its not written to be used without your site. Anyway... regarding to your problem I'll try to update the extension to make use of your forums path instead of the cookie domain. I simply did not think of having it in a subdir, because the forum I was writing it on resides in the root dir of the corresponding domain.

Donza

I was checking about that also. My index page has a Flash on it and the chat box comes up under it. Is there any way you could put some kind of code in one of the pref files that the user could edit to point to the right file rather than hard coding it?

Just a thought - not a programmer

optikinescant

This is pretty sweet, a bit sad that it has to run from their servers, but I was able to just manually edit the extension with my forums base uri and it seems to be working perfectly with my rootdomain/subdir set up vanilla forum. woot.

Donza

Can you translate that into dummy-speak? What means "just manually edit the extension with my forums base url"???

I'm totally blond when it comes to some things

optikinescant

open the default.php in gabbly extension folder go to line 59.... which looks like:

$GabblyURL = "javascript:(top==self) ? document.location='http://gabbly.com/" . $Configuration['COOKIE_DOMAIN'] . "' : top.location=document.URL;";

and change it to:

$GabblyURL = "javascript:(top==self) ? document.location='http://gabbly.com/your_domain.com/your_subfolder/" . "' : top.location=document.URL;";