Tribune

Provides an advanced discussion space, a chatroom, for a website, a kind of enhanced shoutbox meant to be used for real discussion, with dynamical highlighting of answers and references. It allows users to chat in real time (far more reactive than a shoutbox) without having to use a separate client (unlike an IRC channel, for exemple).

The concept is not very easy to describe and the best way to figure out what this module does is to visit the demo website, try posting a few messages, move your mouse and click everywhere, it will really be much clearer than the following technical description.

This tribune has its own page (/tribune), but it can also be displayed as a block (see this page for example).

Another interesting feature is the XML backend, which allows users to access the tribune via an advanced chat client (called a coincoin, some existing coincoins are JCoinCoin, multiplatform, wmCoinCoin, for Linux, or pyCoinCoin, multiplatform, see a more complete list at moules.org, sadly most existing resources are in French only).

Smileys are supported, writing [:totoz] in a message will show this smiley, retrieving it from the server defined in the tribune settings (sfw.totoz.eu by default), alternatively the smileys module can be used.

The way to answer previous messages is to click on their clock, which adds it to the message field, and write the answer after that. When this answer is displayed after it is posted, moving the mouse over the clock in it highlights the first post as well as the other answers, and displays the first post at the top of the screen to see it easily. This makes following discussions much easier than usual shoutboxes or IRC. This feature needs javascript (with some CSS), but the tribune is still usable without javascript.

To reduce server load, only the new posts are reloaded, instead of the whole page, it is also better for users who don't have to wait for the page to be reloaded.

Releases

Official releases	Date	Size	Links	Status
6.x-1.1-1	2008-Aug-28	41.45 KB	Download · Release notes	Recommended for 6.x

Development snapshots	Date	Size	Links	Status
6.x-1.x-dev	2008-Aug-29	41.55 KB	Download · Release notes	Development snapshot