DrupalChat User Online
DrupalChat Online User List
DrupalChat User Offline

DrupalChat allows visitors of your Drupal site to chat with each other privately or together in a public chatroom. This module enables sites to provide online support for their products/services, and thereby increases user engagement. Also, it is useful for social networking sites, forums, blogs, etc. It logs the user conversations so that they can be later viewed in message inbox. You can try it out live here.

Features

  • One on one chat and public chatroom
  • Provides a sleek chat bar at bottom right of the browser
  • Selectable list of Online Users (Once you choose a particular user to chat with, it creates a new tab adjacent to the chat bar along with an attached pop-up chat window)
  • Supports chat for anonymous users (Session API module required for this feature)
  • Provides chat logging and message inbox functionality
  • Supports smilieys (detects them automatically in chat messages)
  • Chat history is retained in between page loads
  • Provides notification sound when a new chat message is received
  • Notifies user by blinking browser title bar and chat popup when a new chat message is received
  • Provides option to use Normal AJAX, long polling and Node.js (currently under development) techniques to update chat messages.
  • Provides optional integration with User Relationships and Flag Friend module.

If you use node.js as backend in this module, then it will be highly scalable. There are two ways to use this backend:

  • First way is to setup your own node.js server and install Nodejs Integration module. This is currently under development.
  • If you don't want to or can't setup your own node.js server, then you can checkout our ready to use node.js server. If you opt for this method, then there is no need to install any additional software/package on your web server. To do so, please visit us at https://www.iflychat.com.

If you use normal AJAX or long polling technique, then this chat module will completely integrate itself with Drupal without requiring installation of any additional software or package on the web server. It will utilize the resources of the same server on which the Drupal site is hosted and use AJAX or long polling method for updating chat messages. These techniques aren't scalable. Please note that Normal AJAX is more stable than Long Polling.

Demo websites

Browser Compatibility

Internet Explorer (7,8), Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari, Google Chrome.

Dependencies

  • jQuery Update - you will need to install the 6.x-2.0 alpha branch of this module for websites running on Drupal 6. For Drupal 7 sites, this is not required.
  • Session API (optional) - if you want to use DrupalChat for anonymous users then you need to enable this module.
  • User Relationships (optional) - if you want to integrate DrupalChat with this module.
  • Node.js Integration (optional) - if you want to use your own node.js server (currently under development)

Ongoing Development

The module is under active development. Although the initial aim was to provide a chat solution which doesn't require any server side modification, since this has been achieved, now the focus is on to provide multiple backends. New backends which will be developed and added to the module will require server side installation but they will be highly scalable. Right now the backend which is being developed will provide optional integration with node.js.

The latest development version of this module has a huge update on all aspects of DrupalChat. It is not stable and there are known bugs still to be attended to. Please only use this version to see the progress of our work.

Sponsorship

Thanks to brad.curnow for donating to this module.

Project information

Releases