AgatonSax wrote…
“looking for a wordpress plugin that allows the site’s authors to post messages to each other in the admin panel…”
That sounds interesting! We had never heard about something like that but after some quick research,we found a plugin that did the job. But it was not on the dashboard, and with an overall bad user experience. So after discussing it in the office, we decided to make better one from scratch.
Why?
Reason one: when you are capable of helping someone, you definitely should.
Reason two: the dashboard is a good place to leave personal messages on. It would be great to be able to send a message to a client saying something like “We just made the upgrade to the latest version of WordPress”, or maybe something more cute like “we love you”.
What?
It ended up as a quite simple dashboard widget with a lot of focus on the visual feedback. When thinking about how to handle long conversations we decided for a few things:
- Don’t send a query to the database and ask for all messages at one time. It could get heavy.
- The user should be able to decide how big the widget should be. There might be other widgets that are important as well.
- A tiwtter-like appending at the bottom of the page is nice for loading older messages.
- The visual feedback when loading older messages should be as good as swimming in the city of Stockholm a warm summer day.
When combining the twitter-like appending with some animated scrolling and resizing with the use of jQuery (now shipped as version 1.4), we cover the whole list above.
This is version 1.0 and expect more to come. Feel free to use it and abuse it. And remember: jQuery is your friend. In the re-tweet is a link to the WordPress plugin directory which also serves as a svn repository (thanks again WordPress).
wearemrhenry wrote…
@AgatonSax http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/dachat #tadaah
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Yves Van Broekhoven, Fred Bergman. Fred Bergman said: @AgatonSax http://bit.ly/6T20EL [...]
Lovely! Thank you very much. I will pay it forward like that annoying kid in that movie.
Antwerpen? Ik ben daar op’t Sint Jan Bergmanns College op school geweest.
I’m now located in Düsseldorf, DE – looking for a way out of this Sauerkraut country… so if you ever need an internet wizzkid. Drop a mail or something! I’m willing to move back to my “fritten” anytime for an interesting position in a small design/development team…
Erm, before I forget to tell you: Nice plugin – thank’s!
I’ve installed this plugin however, when I typ in a message, nothing appears….
What am I doing wrong?
Hi WorldNewsVine,
A couple of questions for debugging:
Do you have JavaScript enabled in your browser?
What version of WordPress do you use?
What browser (with version) do you use?
Do you see the default message in dachat?
Lets find out what is going on!
For some reason it doesnt work on mine too.
I have javascript enabled, with the latest Wordpress to date. I use the latest firefox and theres no default message available.
Any message I post just disappears
Thanks for this nice and handy plugin. That’s exactly what I was looking for
Bass.. I have the same problem as you.
Btw, why not make this into a facebook/gmail like appearance? With something popping up down in the bottom right screen. Right now it’s like forum, which could be handy, but not as cool as a chat would be.
I am unable to activate your plugin, the message is saying there is a fatal error…