Has anyone built something for informal status updates - Chat?

[cowboytomash]

You’re basically looking for a shoutbox. I could use that for my forum, too. Care to share github link as soon as you start development of this one? (Or we could start that together).

[dannorris]

Hey @cowboytomash I had my developer look at this and it’s going to require him learn a bunch of stuff he’s never done before. I am really keen to do this but it’s not going to happen quickly. I’m not sure if we can work together, perhaps we can give some dev hours if you can help show him the ropes? He is fine with the front end stuff but he’s new to Ruby and postgres. He’s a very good learner though. Let me know my email is dan@wpcurve.com if that works best.

[Ajarn]

As soon as you described it as a shoutbox, I now want this. On our Discourse instance we created a thread to replace the shoutbox from a previous forum. It worked for a while, but has now gone dead.

[cowboytomash]

Awesome.
@dannorris , @Ajarn , I’ll try to hack some initial code tonight and see how hard will it be (hint: should be relatively easy becase I plan to cheat a little). Will put it on github right after, of course

[dannorris]

Solid I love cheating!

[cowboytomash]

I’m building the shoutbox as a part of one experimental forum, the repository and branch are here:

tomash/discoursebp

The cheating: it displays posts from one given topic (“shoutbox thread” ) , i.e. there’s a special, designated topic serving as the backbone of shoutbox.

It’s read-only now, I hope to have the shouting form done today. It’s not easy as I’m learning both emberjs and discourse at the same time on this project.

Ditched the separate plugin for now – repo at GitHub - tomash/discourse_shoutbox: Shoutbox plugin for Discourse – because I need to figure out loading all plugin assets (especially ember classes) into the main application.

[dannorris]

Awesome @cowboytomash I’m going to show this to my dev today. Let me know if you need us to help with any front-end JS stuff we can help with that.

[sam]

The gem deployment model has some serious drawbacks, much prefer if you use the new interface, for one it causes Gemfile.lock and Gemfile to diverge leaving you with a constant annoying merge problem.

[cowboytomash]

front-end JS stuff

Does that include Emberjs code? Because I suck hard at this one, especially when faced with Discourse codebase (own idioms etc.)

The gem deployment model has some serious drawbacks

I saw the new architecture and it’s great for small plugins.
The gemified engine still seems like a better approach if the plugin is about to be bigger than a one-screener, especially if it’s going to have own migrations (and models etc.), as the shoutbox will most probably be.

In my opinion the current approach, discourse-is-an-app (and not a mountable rails engine that can be further customized with extending gems, like Spree is) means it is going to be very hard to manage customizations and dependencies. Last time when merging upstream master I had to remove Capistrano from Gemfile (and re-add it after merge).

I can bet Discourse is going to move to Mountable approach (it’s easy, not much work beyond adding lib/engine.rb) and it will happen sooner than later

[sam]

Have you seen my blog? It’s using the new architecture and a rails engine GitHub - SamSaffron/blog: samsaffron.com blog plugin for Discourse

Until secondary gem files land this is the only sustainable solution

[cowboytomash]

Have you seen my blog?

Now I have. The extension code looks solid, I might need to review my opinions on the matter (the one regarding /plugins vs. separate gem, because I still think Discourse will become a mountable app).

[Huey_Le]

Any progress? I think ShoutBox is one of very cool feature that I miss the most, coming from PhpBB background.

[Ajarn]

Same here. I would love to have a shoutbox plugin .

[sam]

Technically authoring a plugin for this is fairly simple, the big issue is design, where does this fit in? We have no aux column

[Ajarn]

Usually they live at the top of pages, so at least at the top of latest.

[Huey_Le]

Some forum like PhpBB put them at the footer of the page with message like this:

WHO'S ONLINE:
In total there are 6 users online :  3 Registered, 1 Hidden and 2 Guests 
Most users ever online was 45 on Thu Dec 19, 2013 1:54 pm

Registered Users: lorem, ipsum, floremipsum

[Mittineague]

But isn’t that like the old “this page has been visited ### times” counters?

Interesting stats for the site admin, but I can’t imagine it being all that useful for visitors.

Have any evidence such is helpful in any way or just a theory?

Right now you can go to Latest and see recent Activity and user avatars, how is that failing?

[sam]

This has nothing to do with shoutbox, seems totally unrelated, Try the shoutbox chat

[Devanil]

I tried to put a third-party shoutbox, was not very good. I was attempting to use the sidebar plugin and put it there.

Here an idea:

But surely with a better design

Could be linked to a topic. So one could use the shoutbox (only on the homepage), or go to the topic.

Shoutbox is the thing I most hope to launch in Discourse

off: No one realized that this is a hi-five, not a prayer?

[Huey_Le]

How about an persistent icon on right next to the Notification icon. Users click on that icon —> the Shout box dialog will appear and users can just chat in there?