Displaying chats outside the content area

this made me thought about the possibility to have a small chat window in a drupal block, so it whould be possible to chat with people that are viewing the same node as i

the node id could be the chat id maybe

just a thought...

i have a chat with DaveNotik about that

we were talking about private messages and the /mgs and /me commands

we must not expect that end users will know how to use IRC commands so we must implement this in an easier way

i was thinking about having a pulldown with the online user names (so people whould be able to choose), but it ended up not beeing a good option

Dave talked about having this private chat windows, like google talk...

i think implementing this to work in all pages needs some thinking, but one idea that i found interesting and doable right now, is that users should be able to click on another user name (online block) and that would open up one tab for private chat with that user, like in some IRC clients (i'm using mIRC)...

Right. Some points I made:

1. Commands /msg and /me are cool, but features (at least the private message feature) should account for everyone, not just IRC-minded people. I should be able to click a user's name to start a private chat w/ them. I floated the idea of using AJAX to spawn a new tab for private chats, when the user is clicked and/or when the /msg command is used (see something like Chatzilla, which opens a new tab when you private message someone and they respond). It seems the plumbing is there already.

2. I like the chat participants being in a block. With block regions, this block can then be placed by the theme developer. I think clicking on the name should pop up a new tab as per my above instead of what it does now. Also, is there a consistent way for presenting a username? Like a Drupal function that themes it appropriately to, for example, show the photo if the photo is enabled. Moshe, others...?

2. There are two types of scenarios when thinking of chat rooms.

A. Topic based chat rooms, i.e. a chat exists and I can join in or not. Think #drupal. That's where chatroom.module is right now.
B. Spontaneous chats, i.e. I click a name to chat with them and invite multiple people in if I'd like. When everyone leaves, the chat's gone. Think instant messaging like Yahoo or AIM.

They're not too different at the core, but very different from a user experience perspective. For B, you want these discussions to be able to be spawned while the user is anywhere in the site -- hence my push for popup chats, though I really think the better experience is making it a layer in the window like Gmail Chats... which stays in the window floating as you navigate around the site doing your business. This may require some extensive AJAX stuff to Drupal, but is very possible... how can we get there?

Marked issue 74009 as a duplicate of this issue.

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