babble.client 1.1

Babble: Instant Messaging for Plone

Babble is an instant messaging service for Plone. It consists of babble.client for the Plone front-end and babble.server, a Zope2 messaging service, for the backend.

The client consists of an Online contacts portlet and modal chatboxes that make extensive use of JQuery and Ajax techniques.

Communication between the client and server is done by polling via XML-RPC and JSON.

Server-push options such as Comet, could be considered in the future, but there is no implementation for this at the moment.

Features:

• Remembers open chat windows on page reload

• Chat windows can be minimized

• New messages automatically opens chat window

• An ‘online users’ portlet provides a list of currently online users

• Configurable polling intervals

• Requests to the messaging service must be password authenticated

• Can run on a different server than the messaging service

• Well tested.

Compatibility:

Confirmed to work with Plone 3.3 and Plone 4

Configuration:

babble.client needs a running zope instance with a configured babble.server messaging service. (see the babble.server README)

The client is configured via the portal_chat tool in the ZMI: - The fields must indicate the babble.server service’s particulars. - The maximum and minimum polling intervals can also be set in this tool. The default values are recommended though.

How do I start using it?

Make sure that babble.client is installed via Plone’s control panel, or the portal_quickinstaller tool in the ZMI (Zope management interface).

In Plone, go to the portlets manage page. In the dropdown of addable portlets, there should now be a new types of portlet, Online contacts.

Add this portlet. If you have more than one person currently using the site, you should see them appear in this portlet.

Note: When you are running your portal_javascripts registry is in debug mode (or when you are running ‘./bin/instance fg’ in Plone4), then the Online contacts portlet will show all the registered users, and not just the online ones, to make debugging easier.

Simply click on the user in the portlet, and a chatbox will appear in the bottom right of the page.

Now start babbling!

actionbar.panel integration:

You can use the chat service with a floating toolbar at the bottom (as was popularised with Facebook).

There exists an add-on for actionbar.panel, that provides this functionality.

Simply install actionbar.babble (which will pull in actionbar.panel), to receive a bottom bar on which the chat windows will dock.

A word of advice:

When, working locally or on production, I would recommend runnning the messaging service (babble.server) in a standalone Zope instance or in a separate Zeo client.

Whenever I ran it in the same single non-zeo instance as the client, I would have problems with the browser not responding after I restart the instance.

Contact:

Is there information lacking in this readme? Contact me with questions or suggestions: - brand@syslab.com

TODO:

• Currently Javascripts can’t run anymore because of DTML, therefore, consider replacing dtml with collective.xrtresource.