Site-wide "who's online" block [#73467]

We discussed the ability to initiate a spontaneous chat (scenario B) from anywhere in a Drupal site. I should be able to click on a name and start chatting with them. Maybe it pops out a new window, as per the other issue we created for that.

I should be able to chat w/ multiple users, so multiple chat boxes (or tabs) should allow for that. Again, see Gmail Chat.

The first step is to create a site-wide "Who's online" block that allows for this.

Though it's very different, keep in mind that Drupal's "Who's online" block exists, too.

We'll eventually want to make it work so that just users of a particular group show, or just my friends...

Comments

Comment #1

Anonymous (not verified) commented 13 July 2006 at 03:13

Assigned:

Unassigned

i'll work on this - i have some prototype code that i'm not happy enough with to put in yet.

Comment #2

pacheco commented 13 July 2006 at 04:06

i was thinking about "my friends" block thing (the only way, i'm my opinion)

think it should be a new module, something like myfriends.module, so other modules (including this one) could hook in it's API and use it to give user some options, like send emails to a friend or, in our case, start a new private chat...

will do some research to find out if we have some contrib module that does something like that

but my point is that we should avoind ending up with a "my friends" block that will only work to chatroom

Comment #3

moshe weitzman commented 13 July 2006 at 04:55

the buddylist module is the standard way to keep a friends list. submit patches there if it needs to get more flexible. i think it is sufficient now, though.

Comment #4

Anonymous (not verified) commented 14 July 2006 at 11:13

as a first attempt at this, i'd like to see this come via the user.module's who's online list. it would be really nice to be able to patch the user.module so that:
- it could be optionally enabled to update in real time
- it allowed for modules to add links to the user listing, eg "start a chat"

don't know if i have any chance of getting this into core, but i'll start an issue for it and see how i go. i spent some time looking at user.module, and this doesn't look like it would be too hard to do.

the chatroom module could then supply the code for:
- a popout chat window for a private one on one chat
- a block that would allow realtime notifications of an invite to chat
- integration with buddy module (or via options in the users settings page or whatever) to provide control over who could start chats with whom.

ideally, it should also be possible for other modules to setup lists of users that linked contained links to start a chat without having to use the user.module supplied block.

thoughts?

Comment #5

Anonymous (not verified) commented 23 July 2006 at 08:34

i've started on this, as i've given up on using the user modules online list - will just reimplement it in the chatroom module.

i'd like the chatroom module to have a simple implementation of access control for this, but allow modules to override this if they need more.

Comment #6

Anonymous (not verified) commented 8 September 2006 at 23:42

i'll have a first cut at this committed in the next 48 hours.

Comment #7

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

Assigned:

» Unassigned

Comment #8

pembeci commented 10 October 2006 at 16:41

I downloaded the module a few days ago and it seems like now this block is also included. My feature request is to have a link to the chat the user is chatting, something like:

guest2 @ Sports
user4 @ General

The rationale is if there a lot of chatrooms and chats going on then this modification saves me a lot of time when I see a user I know chatting and want to join him/her.