Chat Tutorial

My Musical Preferences · Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2003 12:15 pm (21 years, 1 month ago)

I read a few posts about your chat room but notice there wasn't what I would call a tutorial. Have you thought about doing a step by step tutorial on integrating a chat into phpBB?

(and when I say step by step I mean step by step, from first to last step, for us thickies Wink

)

Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2003 12:55 pm (21 years, 1 month ago)

the 4webhelp chat room isn't integrated into phpBB, it's IRC and runs on webchat.org...as far as I know, it doesn't have anything to do with the forums.

My Musical Preferences · Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2003 1:49 pm (21 years, 1 month ago)

yeah, I realise that but it's easily linked from the forum where it pulls in your forum username to use when you enter, as I noticed this morning while playing around Very Happy

And as someone who can only get onto IRC with full instructions (or by the way of clicking a link) it would be handy to know how to set it up 'from scratch' Laughing

Team Member Joined: 06 Jan 2002 Posts: 2564

As adam says, the forums aren't really linked to the chat room. All I have done is install a java interface from http://www.webmaster.com which access the webchat.org servers. In the code which calls the java applet, there is an option to set the username (although you won't be able to keep it if it is already registered on the IRC server). What I did was add a little PHP like this:

Code:

All that does it print out the username which is passed in the query string, like this: chat.php?username=Daniel. The applet then uses this to connect.

My Musical Preferences · Posted: Sun Mar 09, 2003 5:52 pm (21 years, 1 month ago)

Quote:

All that does it print out the username which is passed in the query string, like this: chat.php?username=Daniel. The applet then uses this to connect

ah, so how does that look in the links? What is the format of the link itself in the template?
Thanks. Smile

Team Member Joined: 06 Jan 2002 Posts: 2564

In the template:

Code:

After:

Code:

'T_SPAN_CLASS3' => $theme['span_class3'],

In includes/page_header.php:

Code:

'CHAT' => append_sid("chat.php?username=".$userdata['username']),

My Musical Preferences · Posted: Sun Mar 09, 2003 6:31 pm (21 years, 1 month ago)

excellent thanks. I have a chat room on my site at the moment but it's actually running on my home PC at the moment until I can find another that I feel is satisfactory. I tried the Backpack one but for some reason it kept crashing my browser and twice locked up my PC so only a reboot would release it. (Although yours did neither when I looked in there)

I'll let you know how it goes Very Happy

My Musical Preferences · Posted: Sun Mar 09, 2003 7:56 pm (21 years, 1 month ago)

excellent! This also worked for my chat Very Happy

I just changed username to login as that's what the param name is.That should keep some users happy, save them having to click 2 links to join the chat Wink

Now I just need to find out how to include the 'users online in chat' text file that I generate.

Team Member Joined: 06 Jan 2002 Posts: 2564

Is this what you're looking for?

http://www.forums.34sp.com/viewtopic.php?t=1855

My Musical Preferences · Posted: Sun Mar 09, 2003 8:52 pm (21 years, 1 month ago)

Unfortunately not. My chat isn't IRC but I can access it with mIRC with a script and mIRC generates my usernames.txt file and logs the chat. I'm basicaly just trying to find somewhere to include the file that doesn't wreck everything on the forum. The problem at the moment is that I'd like to just <?php include.... the file but this doesn't work in the templates and even when I tried the "php in templates" mod it wouldn't work. And that's as far as I've progresssed so far but am still working on it Very Happy

Team Member Joined: 06 Jan 2002 Posts: 2564

Try this in page_header.php:

Code:

ob_start();
include($DOCUMENT_ROOT.'/file.php');
$online = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();

Then put this after the line I told you to insert in my second last post:

Code:

'ONLINE' => $online,

Then just put {ONLINE} in your template. That should work..

My Musical Preferences · Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2003 8:02 am (21 years, 1 month ago)

Thanks. I'll give that a try, I'll let you know how I get on Smile

My Musical Preferences · Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2003 10:10 am (21 years, 1 month ago)

Fantastic

All sorted now, thanks for all your help.
if you want to take a look http://www.ashington-ne.co.uk/forum/index.php I have it set so only registered members can get into the chat this way as it tried to log all unregistered in as Anonymous, first one got in fine no others could get in (found when testing), so a temp account has been created with Username: test Password: test

My Musical Preferences · Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2003 10:35 am (21 years, 1 month ago)

Just had to make an amendment, had to change the include statement to be

Code:

"include($phpbb_root_path . 'chatonline.php');"

as it threw up errors in posting.php

Code:

Warning: open_basedir restriction in effect. File is in wrong directory in /usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/ashington-ne.co.uk/httpdocs/forum/includes/page_header.php on line 360 
 
Warning: Failed opening '/forum/chatonline.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:') in /usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/ashington-ne.co.uk/httpdocs/forum/includes/page_header.php on line 360