New chat room opened its door

Hi all,

We've just opened up the doors to our new chat room.

I expect the chat room will be a huge help to all ocPortal users who need quick answers– plus it makes it easier for people to get to know each other.


As you probably know, ocPortal comes with it's own chat room built in, so why didn't we just open these earlier I hear you ask? The reason is that ocPortal's standard chat room is great for community websites, but not so good for the type of community where people will want to keep it running in the background all day. Webapps aren't great for that, nobody wants to keep rechecking a browser window for new messages. Most projects have IRC chat rooms instead, but these have a different problem – IRC tends to be very confusing to set up, and most people don't find it a very comfortable environment to work in. Some sites integrate IRC via Java plugins, but Java plugins frankly suck for a number of reasons.

We've taken a different approach. Our chat room has the best of both worlds: it is available via our website, but it is powered by XMPP (Jabber), meaning you can connect with a normal desktop Jabber client. In other words, ocportal.com is now an XMPP server. We have also integrated ocPortal logins, so there is no need to register with a new username and tell people what that username is. It all works completely seamlessly .

Technically, this was all very complex to pull off, I personally spent about 3 days fixing bugs in the tools we used to make it – but I think it was definitely worth it. I'm hoping some of you will set up permanently-running Jabber clients so there's always someone around, and I hope to be able to hang around there myself from time to time.

Wow, never used Jabber but I will go find it and download it to try out. What do we have to do to link to here? just use the same username? Is there any chance of something like this ever creeping into the core code? I am currently running a training support site that this would go very nicely in…

As always thanks for all your hard work.

Never mind about the connecting process, just noticed the instructions in the room...