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Live Chat With Wordpress

Posted on July 27, 2008
Filed Under General |

I have received a few queries about Wordpress Plugins, in particular a Live Chat plugin. I have found this one to be very good, in fact i have implemented it on this site - see the Live Chat tab on the navigation menu at the top of my page. Note, i have temporarily disabled the Live Chat so i can post the exact code here in this guide, otherwise it would appear instead of the code snippet, making the guide useless.

The plugin i am talking about is called WP-Live-Chat and can be downloaded free from here. It basically allows you to set up an IRC channel and embed it in your page on your blog, so any users can chat live to each other via that channel. It is especially good ifyou have decent traffic and a strong community where people may want to discuss a lot of topics live.

It is very simple to set up, but you must ensure your hosting server supports Javascript - if your hosts block script execution then it will likely fail to run properly. You should email your host’s customer support to check this out.

Once you confirm Javascript is ok to run on your server, upload the plugin zip to your /plugins folder and extract it. In your WP-Admin panel go to the Plugins tab and activate the plugin. Once activated, create a new Page (or a new Post if you prefer) and enter any lead in text you need.

One thing to also consider before the next step is what image you want for the chat ’splash’ graphics. If you want a custom image then you need to upload that image to your server before going on to the next step. Dont make the image too big or it may ruin your layout or get cut off in places. This may take some experimenting to get it the right size.

So the final step is to enter the following example code (modified to fit your site of course) on the page under ‘Visual’ editing mode.

[livechat:WPninja:skin:default:image:http://example.com/x.jpg:close]

Just to explain this code, the ‘WPninja’ parameter is the channel name you wish to initiate on launch. The ’skin’ parameter can be changed (check out the author’s homepage for more info on that) though i quite like the default best. The ‘image’ parameter is the full url of the splash graphic image you want to display on the page - users will click on this image to launch the live chat app.

Well, thats all there is to it, so try it out - let me know if you have any trouble or questions and i’ll be glad to assist.

Comments

3 Responses to “Live Chat With Wordpress”

  1. jacki on November 2nd, 2008 7:47 am

    Hi Paul

    Thanks for putting all this info on your site. I hope you get lots of people coming here.

    My question about the chat plugin is just this:

    Can you configure it to sit in the sidebar of the home page? Or is it too big for that?

    Cheers!!

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