Posted by sun on February 18, 2007 at 10:36pm
3 followers
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| Project: | Chatblock |
| Version: | 5.x-1.0.x-dev |
| Component: | Documentation |
| Category: | task |
| Priority: | critical |
| Assigned: | dwees |
| Status: | closed (won't fix) |
Issue Summary
Regarding http://groups.drupal.org/node/2765 , could you please explain the difference of your module to the already existing chat modules for Drupal and why you did not join forces with the current maintainers of those modules?
Unless your module does not behave totally special it is not welcome to create new projects that duplicate the functionality of already existing ones.
Comments
#1
I created chat block for my site because I wanted a chat room that was by default 'on', that all of my authorized users could join, and was displayed on any pages I chose. The difference between my module and Chatroom is that I have one site-wide chat, and it is displayed as a block.
I also wrote my module because there are fewer Drupal 5 compatible chat modules, and I had tried to upgrade a couple of them myself to no success and decided it might be easier to write my own.
However, I can definitely see how this is, at least partially, a duplication of effort, and am certainly willing to join forces with another developer to merge our modules, removing mine from the projects list in the process.
Current features that my module has are:
1. Displayed as a block.
2. Updates via Ajax but degrades gracefully if Javascript is not present.
3. Admin can choose whether or not they see this block.
4. Includes a chat log page (which has a pagered view of all of the messages for the chat) which permissions to view can be configured.
5. Includes 2 levels of additional permissions, 'View chats' and 'Join chats'. Users who have the first can only see the chats going on, users who have both permissions can see and respond in the chat interface.
6. Smiley/URL replacement support is included, with a help page to show what text leads to what image/link.
I'd like to see whatever module ends up being chosen at the end to include these features.
Dave
#2
Is this module not more of a "shoutbox" kind of module than a "one on one" chat module?
#3
Yeah I suppose that is true.
I was thinking that the next obvious feature would be chat rooms searchable by taxonomy, which means they should become nodes. Then an administrator could add a 'chat room', link it with the correct taxonomy, and then this module creates a new node with the correct title, where the body is a chat. Probably each node would be individually configurable (maybe even with a selection for roles allowed into this chatroom?), right when it was created, and that the chat room callback would be modified to work on nodes, instead of the block.
Not sure how much interest there is in such a feature, but it would certainly make this module less of a site-wide chat module, and more of a Yahoo! style chat application.
Dave
#4
Cleaning out my issue queue.