jQuery chat plugin

Phil — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:37:13 +0000

The aim of the plugin is to provide a Facebook-like chatroom that can easily be added to any website. The plugin is written in Javascript and makes heavy use of the jQuery library to simplify implementation and integration.

The proposed features are:

Changable online status
Auto-away
Chatrooms
Private messaging
Friends list
Anything else that looks cool!

I have finished work on version 0.1 which is the first working version, here are a few screenshots:

The status menu

The friends list

An example chat room

I have not added private messaging yet, but this will be added in a future version.

Targets for version 0.2:

Add private messaging
Improve PHP callback API
Improve speed of message display
Look at using persistent AJAX requests (Comet)

WordPress Plugin – Final tweaks

Phil — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 02:56:12 +0000

The plugin is now pretty much finished, there are certainly other options that could be added such as page summaries via AJAX, custom image sizes for specific preview etc but for now the only thing that is really left to do is to add a quicktag option so that the plugin can be easily used from the post editor.

This is very simple to do, first I have created a hook to add a script file:

add_action(‘admin_print_scripts’, array(&$this, ‘Admin_Script’));

This script is only loaded within the admin (hence the action is ‘admin_print_scripts’) and it tells WordPress which function to get the script definition.

The Admin_Script function attaches a simple Javascript file to add the quicktag:

/**

 * Load admin javascipt file

 *

 * @return void

 */

function Admin_Script() {

        wp_enqueue_script(‘wp-thumbshot-preview’,

                          plugin_dir_url(__FILE__) . ‘wp-thumbshot-preview.js’,

                          array(‘quicktags’),

                          ’0.1′);

}

It’s fairly obvious what this does, worth noting that quicktags is a prerequisite (so that the quicktags Javascript functions are loaded first).

The Javascript file ‘wp-thumbshot-preview.js’ contains the quicktag definition:

edButtons[edButtons.length] =

        new edButton(‘preview’,

                     ‘preview’,

                     ‘[preview]‘,

                     ‘[/preview]‘,

                     ”);

Now in the code editor there is a ‘preview’ button so that the plugin’s preview tags can be auto completed!

Phil Bayfield » JavaScript

jQuery chat plugin

WordPress Plugin – Final tweaks