chatrooms and chat listing - like forum.module [#73154]

starting this issue to get some feedback about using the terms "chatrooms" and "chats". first off, i'm open to changing the names, and even the underlying ideas if someone can show me a better way.

seems that the reasoning behind this is not obvious to many people, so here goes.

in my initial implementation, chatrooms are not where the talking happens. they are a container for chats, like a forum is a container for forum posts:
- you can view all the individual chats in a chatroom like you can view posts in a forum
- you create a chatroom about widgets, then you start/join chats about particular aspects of widgets without having to read the whole forum

this is a bit different from a chatroom just being an ongoing place for discussion. (although a single chat could just be continued and operate as an ongoing discussion.) i thought it was important to make it easy to organise "chats" as events that could easily be instigated, then referred back to later, hence the archiving functionality.

so, does that make any sense? should we use different terms for this? am i going down the wrong track entirely?

cheers
justin

Comment	File	Size	Author
#9	chatroom.jpg	30.19 KB	moshe weitzman
#8	patch_133	4.79 KB	moshe weitzman

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Comments

Comment #1

moshe weitzman CreditAttribution: moshe weitzman commented 11 July 2006 at 14:56

Having an organizing mechanism for chats is a good thing. How about doing it exactly like forum.module. If you study its code, it uses a dedicated vocabulary (i.e. the taxonomy module) to organize the topics. Consistency here seems like a good idea. I can help if you have questions about this. I didn't write it, but I like the implementation. You might even be able to generalize the code in forum.module a bit and reuse. That would require a core patch though. Not a big deal.

Now, you certainly do need two terms that map to forum and forum topic. I suggest Lobby and Chat room. I think those are familar terms but i'm not 100% on them.

I still haven't done a code review, so please forgive my half informed comments.

Comment #2

pacheco CreditAttribution: pacheco commented 12 July 2006 at 01:08

moshe statement about consistency makes total sense to me

i need to study forum.module implementation a litle bit more but i think that the first step on this direction should be making chats became nodes

Comment #3

moshe weitzman CreditAttribution: moshe weitzman commented 29 July 2006 at 02:32

yes - in order for this to work, chats need to be nodes and lobbies (i.e. the groups of chats) need to be taxo terms.

Comment #4

pcs305 CreditAttribution: pcs305 commented 2 August 2006 at 18:56

I personally do not like the name "chatroom" so I will make a couple of suggestions.
How about "Conversation" or "Conversations" as the module/concept name with "talks" or "tracks" for the sub-topics.

IE: You can have a room housing "Conversations" on cars with an entry for Renault, Ford etc and under renault you can have a "talk" or "track" on Renaults Formula1 racing team and Renaults History etc...

Ian

Comment #5

DaveNotik CreditAttribution: DaveNotik commented 2 August 2006 at 20:01

I don't like the suggestion in #4.

Thinking aloud here:

The idea is that one should be able to peruse a list of available chats much as they peruse the available forums.

Currently, it looks like you can see a list of "chatrooms", each of which may have a number of available "chats" under it, and you can open a particular "chat". Do we need all these layers?

What if we had "chats" (listing all available chats) and "chat" (the individual chat).

Or "available chatrooms" and "chatroom"?

I think the archiving functionality makes this more difficult.

Then again, considering this use case: a committee of Organization X wants to host a chat at 2PM Sunday and invites everyone. At 3PM the chat is over and it gets archived. So maybe it does make sense that this commitee can create its own area listing chatrooms specific to this commitee, showing both active and archived chats, That the intent? Or should that be left to OG?

Although the most common use would likely be: Organization N wants to have a page listing their chat rooms, e.g. Development Chat, Support Chat, Theming Chat. Like drupal.org itself.

Speaking of which, integrating this w/ IRC, and eventually the jabber.org protocol, doing this right, would be super.

Ok, I'll stop rambling.

Comment #6

Anonymous (not verified) CreditAttribution: Anonymous commented 8 September 2006 at 23:39

sorry for the delayed response.

after some correspondence with moshe, here are the changes i plan to implement over the next couple of weeks:

CHANGES
--------------
- terminology change. chat == forum topic, lobby == forum.
- storage change. lobbies are taxonomy terms in a specified vocabulary.
chats are nodes tagged with a term in that vocab
- administration change: same as forum.module. provide a UI for setting up
lobbies and containers. on the backend, these create taxo terms in the
specified vocab.
- preferences like forum: admin/content/forum/settings. we should just
reususe forum icons for 'hot' and such.
- presentation change. create pages that are equivalent of forum overview
and topic listing (i.e. http://drupal.org/forum and http://drupal.org/forum/8)

i'll flesh this out and create separate issues as i go.

feedback is welcome.

Comment #7

Anonymous (not verified) CreditAttribution: Anonymous commented 16 September 2006 at 12:42

Assigned:

» Unassigned

Comment #8

moshe weitzman CreditAttribution: moshe weitzman commented 7 October 2006 at 00:54

Title:	chatrooms and chats - should these names and or concepts be changed?	» chatrooms and chat listing - like forum.module
Assigned:	Unassigned	» moshe weitzman
Category:	task	» feature
Status:	Active	» Needs review

File	Size
patch_133	4.79 KB

the attached patch changes the chatrooms listing page so it matches the layout of the forums listing page. hooray for consistency. is themeable in the same way as forum page.