Timestamp for each message?

The theming of messages is performed by the function theme_im_msgs($msgs, $other_name) in im.moduke

you can override this with any of the normal Drupal theme overide methods such as a function in your theme's template.php

The $msgs array holds a single message and contain the following fields:

      'mid' => autoincrement message ID
      'other_name' => name of the person you are talking with
      'suid' => uid of the sender of the message
      'ruid' => uid of teh recipient of the message
      'sname' => name of the sender
      'rname' => name of the recipient
      'msg' => the message text
      'sent_time' => timestamp of when the message was sent, formatted 'Y-m-d H:i:s'

The current function looks like this:

function theme_im_msgs($msgs, $other_name) {
  global $user;
	
  $uid = $user->uid;
  
  $output = '';
  if (sizeof($msgs) > 0) {
    foreach ($msgs as $key => $msg) {
      $output .= '<span class="im-console-msg-name">' ;
      
      if ($user->uid == $msg['suid']) {
        $output .= t('Me') .': </span>';  
        $output .= '<span class="im-console-my-msgtext">';
      }
      else {
        $output .= $msg['sname'] .': </span>';  
        $output .= '<span class="im-console-other-msgtext">';
      }
      $output .= check_plain($msg['msg']);
      $output .= '</span><br/>';
    }
  }
  return $output;
}

If you wanted the datetime to appear at the beginning of each message, you might add this modified function to your theme's template.php

function phptemplate_im_msgs($msgs, $other_name) {
  global $user;
  
  $uid = $user->uid;
  
  $output = '';
  if (sizeof($msgs) > 0) {
    foreach ($msgs as $key => $msg) {
      $output .= '<span class="im-console-msg-datetime">' ;
      $output .= $msg['sent_time'];
      $output .= ' </span>';

      $output .= '<span class="im-console-msg-name">' ;
      
      if ($user->uid == $msg['suid']) {
        $output .= t('Me') .': </span>';  
        $output .= '<span class="im-console-my-msgtext">';
      }
      else {
        $output .= $msg['sname'] .': </span>';  
        $output .= '<span class="im-console-other-msgtext">';
      }
      $output .= check_plain($msg['msg']);
      $output .= '</span><br/>';
    }
  }
  return $output;
}

If you want it to appear on the right, justified, then you probably want to use tables or divs with css.

Hope this helps.

Yeah ... i should have put the formatting in a themable function ... but you can convert the formatted time string back to an integer with the strtotime() function and then reformat it as you want like so:

      $output .= date(strtotime($msg['sent_time']), 'H:i a');