24 September 2014, 4:25

I recently posted to a thread on Chat plug-ins here. I am re-posting it here hoping I can get a response. I wrote:

Is there a chat plug-in yet? This thread says it has been abandoned, and this thread says that it is only reliant on an upgrade.. I have wrote the Aaron Wells who is the author of the plugin "bootstrap" relying on the upgrade but got no response.

I am a student with Gaia University and I am developing the main Mahara group that will host all our forums and a gallery of the students e-portfolio work. I have had it as one of the main goals of the group to have chat capability, but have yet to find out how. Does anyone here know how and which plugin to install?

Thank, Simha

02 October 2014, 6:50

See the image above? This happens all the time. Live chat is a basic feature, I don't see that it is even addressed in the new 1.10... Why? At Gaia University we suffer both loss of connectivity between students and loss of student activity on the web site because of this limit. If it was my platform this would be number one priority above all the 35 new features of 1.10. 

02 October 2014, 7:52

Hi Simha,

Live chat was planned to be in the 1.10 release and we were quite a ways down the path to achieving it but it didn't end up happening. It is such a big feature that it requires sponsorship to achieve and the sponsor that we had lined up decided to go in another direction.

See https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/547932 for the progress we made.

Hopefully we will be able to get chat into core sometime in the near future

Cheers

Robert

02 October 2014, 8:09

Hi Simha,

as a work around until the real chat feature is completed, why not play with this a little: https://togetherjs.com/ You can try it on http://www.portfoliocommunities.com for free. Here is a previous forum thread on it: https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=6282

Not perfect but it works for me.Cheers,

Dirk

02 October 2014, 11:42

Hey Dirk, thanks for your answer! Nice to know what the situation is. I hope a new sponsor can be found, it will make Mahara 100% more functional for groups like Gaia University! Thanks for all you are doing!

02 October 2014, 11:48

Do you know how much the donation needs to be for this to happen?

13 October 2014, 21:04

Hi Dirk,

I registered to your portfolio communities page and checked out the togetherjs chat you have installed, that is great! I now have access to a sandbox version of Mahara so I have admin capabilities. I would love to know how you installed it. 

Thanks, Simha

14 October 2014, 2:57

Hi Simha,

you can't add it from mahara itself. Someone with access to the server needs to do it. Here is what should work:

For example:

1) Add this line somewhere to htdocs/theme/raw/view/header.tpl This ensures that the relevant code is loaded.

<script src="https://togetherjs.com/togetherjs-min.js"></script>

You could also add the togetherjs-min.js to htdocs/js and adjust the link above I think.

2) Add this line to where you want the button to appear. In my case I added it to theme/auburn/templates/header/head.tpl where 'auburn' is the name of a custom theme I use. You can put the button anywhere you like it, maybe in the footer, in a side block etc. It takes some playing to decide where it works best.

<button onclick="TogetherJS(this); return false;" style="float: right;">Team Work</button>

Here is some more documentation. https://togetherjs.com/docs/

Good luck. I think its worth the effort adding it. Maybe tell us how it works for you.

Cheers,

Dirk

p.s.: Maybe put it into Moodle also. Then the students could write their quizzes together :)