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How to create your own chat. Communication between employees in the office. MyChat is the best chat for the office. Displaying the login form

Chat is a page on the Internet that allows you to communicate with many users at the same time. There are a great many of them all over the World Wide Web. There are chats on local networks, in organizations, and there are users who create chats for themselves and their friends to communicate without strangers. This is very convenient for discussing any joint event.

Instructions
  • To create a chat, first select a site that provides free chat registration services. There are now a lot of such resources on the Internet, for example, http://cbox.ws/getone.php. Before creating your chat, come up with a name for it that would interest users and would not be busy on the resource you have chosen.
  • Complete the registration procedure on the resource. To do this, you need to select the “create your own chat” or “sign up” command and fill out the form fields. First of all, this is the name for your chat - it will be placed in front of the name of the resource that provides the registration service.
  • Fill in the “Email address” field. An email address is needed to activate your chat. You will receive a special email in which you will be asked to follow a link to confirm the creation of the chat.
  • Next, enter the password for your chat in the field. With its help, you will log in as its administrator and manage it. The Password field is filled in twice to avoid errors.
  • Select your chat language and style. Different resources offer different design styles. So you can make your own chat and design it according to your liking. Be sure to check the “I have read the rules” box. Next, when all the fields are filled in, click the “register” or “create my chat” button.
  • After registration, log in using your username and password and select the chat control panel. It contains many management tools, for example, choosing a chat template, managing design, moderation and users (deleting and adding, renaming). To make your own chat, it’s not enough to register it. You will need basic knowledge of HTML language to customize the appearance of the chat as you wish.

    • Before creating a chat for a website, you need to understand that voice and text web chats are an important feature for Internet projects. This method allows visitors to communicate via the Internet using a browser. This method is implemented on the client's web architecture and the Client browser is a program that requests and receives feedback from the server. The server operates at a separate address, it receives, stores and sends information upon request. Communication between the client and the server host occurs via a network protocol.

    Standard chats are installed on the user’s computer in the form of programs. The second option is Internet chats (communication in an online interface).

    Internet chat is a method of interactive communication in real time, built on the basis of Web servers. In web chats, the client part of network applications is performed by the browser, because the browser contains the JavaScript language, on the basis of which chat-type applications operate.

    Chats for communicating with visitors on the site allow you to work without additional installation of third-party programs. Correspondence between the server and clients works on different technologies. Typically, an online chat client program is developed in JavaScript, that is, implemented in Ajax.

    Making a chat using code

    You can create chats for websites in various ways, but among them there are two main ones:

    Handwritten using HTML. This is a simple document that includes libraries, style sheets, and JavaScript scripts. Below is the finished mini-chat code:

    Using JavaScript, we will define this code inside ul element. If you click on “Write a message”, a message form will pop up. Paste the code into the site page.

    Special programs
  • For example, you can take a resource specializing in creating chats - Chatadelic.net (partially paid). We register and click on “Create chat”. After that, we come up with a name for the chat, enter the address of the blog where we are going to install it. Next, the HTML code will be generated, which needs to be placed on the site pages.
  • Familiarize yourself with the service and carefully understand the functions in this window. Study the instructions and evaluate the scope of work with this tool. Next, customize the chat according to your wishes, since there are a large number of different options and everyone can personalize their chat exactly for themselves.

    • Advantages:
    • Can be administered and moderated.
    • Sound accompaniment of chat events.
    • Connecting the JavaScript language.
    • Custom backgrounds and CSS styles.
    • Exchange videos, links, pictures.
    • Filtering obscene language.
    • Ability to limit the speed of sending messages.
    • Blocking unwanted users.
    • Work statistics.
    • Integration into the site.
    Third party software

    Below I would like to touch on two more popular programs that are installed on your host. A good example would be free applications:

    • Redhelper is a powerful online counseling system and an excellent free alternative for non-commercial use. The installation is simple and straightforward - the finished code needs to be uploaded to the site in the same way as traffic counters and metrics. You can register and view the functions on the official website.
    • Siteheart (SiteHeart.com/ru/price) is a modern and convenient tool that offers a lot of useful solutions, including installing applications for working via a smartphone, as well as widgets and extensions, which can be found on the official website or downloaded from other resources.
    Where is the best place to install chat?

    You can create a chat for the site in a place where it will be more visible: this place can be the main page or the article page. Also, it can be displayed in the widget and footer. As you already understand, you can install it without any special skills, knowledge of code and CSS styles, everything has already been invented, is freely available, we install and use it.

    Important!

    Don't forget to include rules of conduct for those who will use the chat.

    This concludes my post and I hope that it was useful to you. Write in the comments your opinion about chats, whether they are needed on the blog at all and why.

    To implement video chat functionality in a browser, there are two most suitable technologies - WebRTC and Flash. Each of the technologies has a number of its own features, for example, in Flash you can use H.264 or Sorenson video codecs, and in WebRTC VP8 is currently available, which makes these two approaches poorly compatible with each other (on-the-fly video transcoding is very expensive operation), besides, it’s better to do video chat peer-to-peer whenever possible, needless to say, it won’t work to connect Flash and WebRTC directly. In our example, we will consider the option of video calling a call from WebRTC to WebRTC, using the VoxImplant platform. In general, we can make a choice of a specific option, up to a dynamic choice of technology depending on who we are calling. Details, as usual, are under the cut.

    Creating an application, users, script and configuration First, we need a VoxImplant developer account (), after logging into the VoxImplant control panel in the Applications section, create a new application and call it videochat. To organize a simple video chat, we need at least 2 users - testuser1 and testuser2, create them in the Users section and link them to the application using the Assign applications button (similarly, you can link already created users to the application while editing the application). When making a call from user to user, the call processing script is still called, which is written in Javascript and executed by the VoxEngine engine. Create a new script in the Scenarios section, call it User2User; when using peer-to-peer mode, the script will look like this:
    VoxEngine.forwardCallToUserDirect();
    If in the future you want to send video through the server (forcibly), then you can use VoxEngine.forwardCallToUser(null, true); , but in this case the calls will cost money.

    If you need to control signaling in order, for example, to end a call at some point on the server side, then you can use the following script instead of the forwardCallToUserDirect helper:

    Var call1, call2; VoxEngine.addEventListener(AppEvents.CallAlerting, function(e) ( call1 = e.call; call2 = VoxEngine.callUserDirect(e.call, e.destination, e.displayName, e.headers); call2.addEventListener(CallEvents.Connected, handleCallConnected); function handleCallConnected(e) ( call1.answerDirect(call2); // Here you can, for example, disconnect the call after some time setTimeout(VoxEngine.terminate, 5000); )

    After creating the script, we need to bind it to the application through a rule (Rule) - go to the Applications section and edit our application, in the Rules tab we create a new rule (Add rule). You can call it anything you like, for example, Intercom, a regular expression is specified in Pattern - the rule is triggered if the number matches this expression, leave.* and drag our User2User script from Available to Assigned and save the rule. We save the application, all that remains is to create a client using VoxImplant Web SDK.

    Creating a web client The client will only need the voximplant.min.js file, which is on the cdn, as well as a basic understanding of how the Web SDK works. To make everything look more or less decent, you can use Bootstrap. I don’t see the point in dumping all the code from the HTML file here, we’ll only look at the main points, and you can always understand it in more depth by downloading the files from our page on GitHub.

    // Connect the SDK //function to display the log directly in HTML function log(str) ( document.getElementById("log").innerHTML += str+"
    "; ) // Create a VoxImplant instance var voxAPI = VoxImplant.getInstance(); // Hang event handlers voxAPI.on(VoxImplant.Events.SDKReady, onSdkReady); voxAPI.on(VoxImplant.Events.ConnectionEstablished, onConnectionEstablished); voxAPI. on(VoxImplant.Events.ConnectionFailed, onConnectionFailed); voxAPI.on(VoxImplant.Events.ConnectionClosed); voxAPI.on(VoxImplant.Events.AuthResult, onAuthResult); voxAPI.on(VoxImplant.Events.MicAccessResult, onMicAccessResult); // Initialize the SDK try ( voxAPI.init(( micRequired: true, // request access to the microphone/camera before connecting to VoxImplant videoSupport: true // enable video support )) ; ) catch(e) ( // if an initialization error occurred, then display it log(e.message); ) // Now you can use the SDK - connect function onSdkReady())( voxAPI.connect(); // after the call, a dialog will appear access to the camera/microphone ) // Process function onMicAccessResult(e) ( if (e.result) ( // allowed access to the camera/microphone ) else ( // denied access to the camera/microphone ) ) // Established a connection with VoxImplant function onConnectionEstablished() ( // You can log in - here you need to show a dialog for entering data, and then call the following function // Replace application_user, application_name, account_name and application_user_password with your data for testing voxAPI.login(application_user+"@"+application_name+"." +account_name+".voximplant.com", application_user_password); ) // Could not connect to VoxImplant function onConnectionFailed() ( // Either the websockets were not connected or UDP is closed ) // The connection was closed function onConnectionClosed() ( // You can call connect again to reconnect ) function onAuthResult(e) ( if (e.result) ( // logged in - now you can make or receive calls) else ( // authorization error, you can look at the e.code to understand what’s wrong) ) var currentCall = null; // current call // Incoming call function onIncomingCall(e) ( currentCall = e.call; // Hang up the handlers currentCall.on(VoxImplant.CallEvents.Connected, onCallConnected); currentCall.on(VoxImplant.CallEvents.Disconnected, onCallDisconnected); currentCall.on(VoxImplant.CallEvents.Failed, onCallFailed); // Answer the call automatically. In a normal application, it is better to show information about the incoming call and give the option to accept or reject currentCall.answer(null, (), ( receiveVideo: true, sendVideo: true )); // Function for an outgoing call function createCall() ( // application_username - name of the user who is calling (via video) currentCall = voxAPI.call(application_username, ( receiveVideo: true, sendVideo: true), " TEST CUSTOM DATA", ("X-DirectCall": "true")); // We hang up the handlers currentCall.on(VoxImplant. CallEvents.Connected, onCallConnected); currentCall.on(VoxImplant.CallEvents.Disconnected, onCallDisconnected); currentCall.on(VoxImplant.CallEvents.Failed, onCallFailed); ) // The call is connected function onCallConnected(e) ( // Enable video sending and show the incoming video voxAPI.sendVideo(true); currentCall.showRemoteVideo(true); ) // The call has ended function onCallDisconnected(e) ( currentCall = null; ) // Error when calling function onCallFailed(e) ( // Error code e.code, error description e.reason )

    These are actually all the main functions and events that we need. Naturally, this is bare JS, you need to attach styles and layout to it. The version we posted on GitHub looks like this:

    If you need support for both Flash and WebRTC, you will have to switch the client application to the appropriate mode, because we did not implement WebRTCFlash video calls. We hope that WebRTC support will appear in IE12 in the near future, followed by Safari. If you need the “call from the site to the operator” option, then you can make 2 operator applications, one using WebRTC, the other using Flash, and route calls from the site depending on which SDK mode is enabled for the site visitor, either to one or to another operator.

    It's no secret that the VKontakte social network, like any other similar site, exists so that users can communicate with each other without significant restrictions. As a result of this, and also due to the significant increase in the popularity of various communities, a special addition to the main functionality of the site was developed, which opens up the possibility of creating a multi-user chat for members of any public.

    Please immediately note that anyone who is a full community administrator can organize a multi-user dialogue. At the same time, of course, there should be people in the group who will take part in such a conversation.

    It is also important to note that a conversation in a community is in some way an analogue of similar functionality within the instant messaging system. However, if you compare regular conversations and chat, radical differences in terms of basic tools immediately catch your eye.

    Create a chat

    If we judge the functionality of the conversation in the VK group as a whole, then we can say with confidence that such an application is not worth activating in all communities. This is due to the fact that such a universal dialogue, in which absolutely any VK.com user can take part, requires constant monitoring, the complexity of which progressively increases with the number of public participants.

    Before activating this feature for a large number of users, it is recommended that you independently study how each chat element works. Thanks to this approach, you will not once again strengthen your skills in managing such a dialogue.

    If you are creating a multi-dialogue for any extremely popular community, it is recommended to hire moderators to simplify control of active correspondence.

    At this point, the main process of adding a chat can be considered complete. The following recommendations will help you properly set up multi-dialogue for a group.

    Setting up the chat

    The application for organizing a conversation in a group is a powerful tool with a fairly large number of different parameters. In addition, settings can be found both directly in the chat interface itself, and during its preparation for use.

    Also, pay attention to the captions next to the application image. In particular, this applies to the inscription "Copy link", thanks to which a text link to the newly created chat will be copied to the Windows clipboard.

    As you may have noticed, there is only one link left at the end "Settings". By clicking on it, you will go to the dialog activation window with a single self-explanatory button.

    After activating the chat, you will be automatically redirected to this application.

  • The main field is intended directly for writing and reading messages.

    • The first time you visit the app, you'll receive a notification allowing you to subscribe to alerts for that conversation. It is recommended that you allow this add-on to send you notifications.

  • On the right side of the main area there is a list of participants and two buttons for controlling the application.

  • By clicking on the button "Admin Corner", you will be presented with the most detailed instructions for managing the chat.

  • Opening "Chat Settings", you will be presented with an additional four settings tabs.

  • Paragraph "General settings" fully lives up to its name, since this section contains only basic parameters, for example, visibility. In addition, this is where you are given the opportunity to add a link to the video broadcast, as well as specialized text, which can be a short set of rules of behavior in this chat.

  • Next section "Leaders" allows you to grant any participant manager rights by entering a link to his page.

  • Settings item "Black list" allows you to do the same thing as the social network function of the same name, that is, add any user, even if this person meets the requirements for visiting the chat or is a manager, to the exclusion list.

  • The final, fourth section of the multi-dialogue parameters is the most noteworthy, since it is here that you can activate a unique feature of the application - an automatic filter for obscene expressions. You are also given the opportunity to set parameters for processing links sent through the message form.

  • In addition to everything mentioned above, pay attention to the central inscription in the empty central window. Click on the link “Talk about community chat” to leave the direct address of your multi-dialogue on the group wall.

    • At this point, familiarization with the settings and the process of setting comfortable parameters can be considered complete. When using this application, do not forget that only the community leader has access to all features.

    In this tutorial we will create a simple web chat application using PHP and jQuery. This type of utility is perfect for your website’s online support system.

    Introduction

    The chat application we'll build today will be quite simple. It will include a login and logout system, AJAX-style capabilities, and will also offer support for multiple users.

    Step 1: HTML markup

    We'll start this tutorial by creating our first index.php file.

    Chat - Customer Module

    Welcome,

    Exit Chat

    • We'll start our html with the usual DOCTYPE, html, head, and body tags. In the head tag we will add our title and a link to our css style sheet (style.css).
    • Inside the body tag, we structure our layout inside a wrapper #wrapper div. We will have three main blocks: a simple menu, a chat window and an input field for our message; each with its own corresponding div and id.
      • The menu block #menu div will consist of two paragraphs. The first one will be a greeting to the user and will float to the left, and the second will be a link to the exit and will float to the right. We'll also include a div to clear the elements.
      • The #chatbox div will contain our chat log. We will load our log from an external file using a jQuery ajax request.
      • The last item in our #wrapper div will be our form, which will include a text input field for the user's message and a submit button.
    • We add our scripts last to load the page faster. First we will insert the Google jQuery CDN link since we will be using the jQuery library in this tutorial. Our second script tag will be where we will be working. We will upload all our code once the document is ready.
    Step 2: Create CSS Style

    Now we'll add some css to make our chat app look better than the default browser style. The code below will be added to our style.css file.

    /* CSS Document */ body ( font:12px arial; color: #222; text-align:center; padding:35px; ) form, p, span ( margin:0; padding:0; ) input ( font:12px arial ; ) a ( color:#0000FF; text-decoration:none; ) a:hover ( text-decoration:underline; ) #wrapper, #loginform ( margin:0 auto; padding-bottom:25px; background:#EBF4FB; width :504px; border:1px solid #ACD8F0; ) #loginform ( padding-top:18px; ) #loginform p ( margin: 5px; ) #chatbox ( text-align:left; margin:0 auto; margin-bottom:25px; padding:10px; height:270px; border:1px solid #ACD8F0; overflow:auto; ; ) .error ( color: #ff0000; ) #menu ( padding:12.5px 25px 12.5px 25px; ) .welcome ( float:left; ) .logout ( float:right; ) .msgln ( margin:0 0 2px 0; )

    There is nothing special in the above css other than the fact that some ids or classes that we are styling for will be added a little later.

    As you can see above, we have finished building the chat UI.

    Step 3: Use PHP to create a login form.

    Now we will implement a simple form that will ask the user for his name before passing him on.

    The loginForm() function we created consists of a simple login form that asks the user for his/her name. We then use an if else construct to check if the user has entered a name. If the person entered a name, we set it to $_SESSION["name"]. Since we are using a cookie-based session to store the name, we must call session_start() before printing anything to the browser.

    One thing you might want to pay particular attention to is that we used the htmlspecialchars() function, which converts special characters into HTML entities, thereby protecting the variable name from becoming a victim of cross-site scripting (XSS). We will also add this function later to a text variable that will be published in the chat log.

    Displaying the login form

    In order to show the login form in case the user is not logged in and therefore no session is created, we use another if else statement around the #wrapper div and script tags in our source code. Otherwise, if the user is logged in and has created a session, this code will hide the login form and show the chat window.

    Welcome,

    Exit Chat

    // jQuery Document $(document).ready(function())( ));

    Welcome and logout menu

    We are not yet done creating the login system for this chat app. We still need to give the user the option to log out and end the chat session. As you may remember, our original HTML markup included a simple menu. Let's go back and add some PHP code that will give the menu more functionality.

    First of all, let's add the username to the welcome message. We will do this by outputting the username session.

    Welcome,

    In order to allow the user to log out and end the session, we'll go overboard and use jQuery briefly.

    // jQuery Document $(document).ready(function())( //If user wants to end session $("#exit").click(function())( var exit = confirm("Are you sure you want to end the session?"); if(exit==true)(window.location = "index.php?logout=true";) )); ));

    The jquery code above simply shows a confirmation dialog if the user clicks on the #exit link. If the user confirms the logout, thereby deciding to end the session, we will send it to index.php?logout=true. This will simply create a variable called logout with the value true. We must intercept this variable using PHP:

    If(isset($_GET["logout"]))( //Simple exit message $fp = fopen("log.html", "a"); fwrite($fp, " User ". $_SESSION["name"] ." has left the chat session.
    "); fclose($fp); session_destroy(); header("Location: index.php"); //Redirect the user )

    Now we will see if the get variable "logout" exists using the isset() function. If the variable was passed through a url, such as the link mentioned above, we proceed to end the session of the user with the current username.

    Before destroying the session of the user with the current name using the session_destroy() function, we want to display a simple logout message in the chat log. It will say that the user has left the chat session. We will do this by using the fopen(), fwrite() and fclose() functions to manipulate our log.html file, which we will see later will be created as our chat log. Please note that we have added the "msgln" class to the div. We have already defined the css style for this block.

    Having done this, we destroy the session and redirect the user to the same page where the login form will appear.

    Step 4: Support User Input

    After the user has confirmed his actions in our form, we need to capture his keyboard input and write it to our chat log. In order to do this, we must use jQuery and PHP to work synchronously on the server side and client side.

    jQuery

    Almost everything we're going to do with jQuery to process our data will revolve around a jQuery post request.

    //If user submits the form $("#submitmsg").click(function())( var clientmsg = $("#usermsg").val(); $.post("post.php", (text: clientmsg )); $("#usermsg").attr("value", ""); return false;

  • Before we start doing anything, we need to capture the user's input, or what they typed into the #submitmsg input stream. This can be achieved with the val() function, which takes the value set in the form field. Now we store this value in the clientmsg variable.
  • Here comes the most important part: the jQuery post request. It sends a POST request to the post.php file, which we'll create in a moment. It sends the client's input, or whatever was stored in the clientmsg variable.
  • At the end we clear the #usermsg input by clearing the value attribute.

    • Please note that the code above will go into our script tag where we have placed the jQuery logout code.

    PHP - post.php

    Currently we have POST data sent to the post.php file every time the user submits the form and sends a new message. Our task now is to capture this data and write it to our chat log.

  • Before we do anything, we must start the post.php file using the session_start() function since we will be using the session by username in this file.
  • Using a boolean isset, we will check if a session exists for "name" before doing anything further.
  • Now we will capture the POST data that jQuery sent to this file. We will store this data in the $text variable.
  • This data, as well as all data entered by the user in general, will be stored in the log.html file. To do this, we will open the file in mode "a" of the fopen function, which according to php.net opens the file for writing only; places the file pointer at the end of the file. If the file does not exist, we will try to create it. We will then write our message to a file using the fwrite() function.
    • The message we will be recording will be contained inside a .msgln div. It will contain the date and time generated by the date() function, the username session and text, which will also be surrounded by the htmlspecialchars() function to avoid XSS.

    Finally, we close our file using fclose().

    • Step 5: Displaying the contents of the chat log (log.html)

    Everything the user posts is processed and published using jQuery; it is written to the chat log using PHP. The only thing left to do is show the updated chat log to the user.

    To save us some time, we'll preload the chat log into the #chatbox div as if it contained something.

    We use a procedure similar to the one we used in the post.php file, but this time we only read and output the contents of the file.

    jQuery.ajax request

    The ajax request is the core of everything we do. This request not only allows us to send and receive data through the form without refreshing the page, but it also allows us to process the requested data.

    //Load the file containing the chat log function loadLog())( $.ajax(( url: "log.html", cache: false, success: function(html)( $("#chatbox").html(html) ; //Insert chat log into the #chatbox div ), ));

    We will wrap our ajax request in a function. You'll see why right now. As you can see above, we only used three of the jQuery ajax request objects.

    • url : URL string for the request. We use our chat log file name log.html.
    • cache : This will prevent our file from being cached. This will ensure that whenever we send a request, we will have an updated chat log.
    • sucess : This will allow us to attach a function that will pass the data we requested.

    As you can see, we then move the data we requested (html) into the #chatbox div.

    Autoscroll

    As we may have seen in other chat apps, content automatically scrolls down if the chat log container (#chatbox) becomes full. We'll implement a simple and similar feature that will compare the height of a container's scrollbar before and after we make an ajax request. If the scrollbar height became larger after the request, we use a jQuery animation effect to scroll the #chatbox div.

    //Load the file containing the chat log function loadLog())( var oldscrollHeight = $("#chatbox").attr("scrollHeight") - 20; //Scroll height before the request $.ajax(( url: "log .html", cache: false, success: function(html)( $("#chatbox").html(html); //Insert chat log into the #chatbox div //Auto-scroll var newscrollHeight = $("# chatbox").attr("scrollHeight") - 20; //Scroll height after the request if(newscrollHeight > oldscrollHeight)( $("#chatbox").animate(( scrollTop: newscrollHeight ), "normal"); // Autoscroll to bottom of div ) ), ));

    • First we will store the scrollbar height of the #chatbox div into the oldscrollHeight variable before executing the request.
    • Once our query returns success, we will store the scrollbar height of the #chatbox div into a newscrollHeight variable.
    • We will then compare the scrollbar height in both variables using an if statement. If newscrollHeight is greater than oldscrollHeight, we use an animation effect to scroll the #chatbox div.
    Constantly updating the chat log

    Now the question may arise how often we will update new data transferred between users. Or to rephrase the question, with what regularity will we send constant requests to update data?

    SetInterval(loadLog, 2500); //Reload file every 2500 ms or x ms if you wish to change the second parameter

    The answer to our question lies in the setInterval function. This function will run our loadLog() function every 2.5 seconds, which will ask for an updated file and autoscroll the block.

    Finished

    We're done! I hope you've learned how the basic chat system works, and if you have any suggestions, I'd gladly welcome them. This is the simplest chat system you can create as a chat app. You can build on it and build multiple chat rooms, add an admin area, emoticons, etc. Here, your limit is the sky.

    Below are a few links you might want to check out if you're thinking about expanding this chat app:

    • Protect your forms with form keys - avoid XSS (cross-site scripting) and cross-site request forgery.
    • Submitting a form without refreshing the page using jQuery - extend our ajax request
    • How to make AJAX requests in pure Javascript - learn how the request kitchen works in pure javascript.
    • Follow us on