new chat bar? - (Web Designers?)

[DarrenReeder94]

Hello,

The new chat bar is quite a cool thing. Me and a mate has played around with it and its very similar to the facebook one

Just wondering if anyone knows how it is made from a web design point of view? Im not sure if it was made from scratch or if you can download the source from it

-Thanks!

[gavpowell]

A quick scan of the source code reveals it's a bought package called cometchat - ferret may correct me here as i'm not a webdesigner, but I don't think there's much you need to invent for php-based forums these days- everything has already been done somewhere.

[ferret]

You are correct it is the cometchat bar although I have already heavily customised the chat bar and have lots of extras coming soon.

I have written some script to add several more icons to the bar which will interact with vBulletin (the forum siftware) better to show, image comment, social comment and posts etc

On the cometchat website they say that the script is very light weight and should cause no additional strain on server loads, well all I can say to that is HA HA HA HA HA HA I have had to optimised their code so much that I may as well of written it myself from scratch, with an average over the past 2 days of 300 people all using the script the site has got a little slower but fingers crossed with the upcoming upgrade I have planned that should return to normal.

The original concept which I had was to use a Jabber server which is infact what Facebook, Gmail, MSN and all the messengers use, I spent over £2000 installing a dedicated Jabber server and developing a standalone .net messenger but it got too expensive to develop the chat bar for the site for the interest it was generating so I ditched that for TSF but on the good side one of my commercial clients wanted a chat solution so I managed to get them to use the Jabber server and got back nearly all of my development costs, the mentioned company has 3 offices int he UK and over 250 of its staff use the system to date.

While we are on the subject of Social Networking, I have been working on a website called SnookerProfiles.co.uk which is nearly ready to launch, it will directly link to the TSF database so if you want to be a member of Snooker-Profiles you will also have to be a member of TSF, it will have all the expected features like image gallerys, friends lists, walls etc but the integration with vBulletin will not just be the user info it will be everything!!

For example your image albums on SnookerProfiles will be the same as your albums on the forum, your friends list will be the same as on the forum you can use the chat bar between the two sites and even the private message system will be linked, groups on SnookerProfiles will be directly linked to social groups on the forum.

It is 99% finished just need to sanitise the inputs and work out a few bugs. Demo coming soon.