Attention: I am no longer actively developing Wordspew. Check out Pierre’s Blog for the latest and best wordspew versions.
I’ve preserved this page for archival purposes, and in case I ever want to get started again.
———————————————–
This WordPress plugin adds live chat functionality to your WordPress blog. Your visitors can chat with eachother right in your website without refreshing their browsers. It’s almost like chatting on an instant messenging network! And it’s all powered by AJAX, a hot new old technology that powers things like Gmail, Google Maps, and other brilliant web apps. Now, you can get a piece of all this in your own blog! This plugin makes it very easy. Just follow the simple instructions and you should be okay.
You can download the latest stable version of this plugin, version 1.16. When upgrading, you MUST activate and reactivate the plugin. Released: August 17, 2005.
Features
Uses AJAX – No need to refresh ever. Other people’s comments will appear in real time. WordPress admin panel that allows you to control colors, update times, and edit/delete comments. Displays the the time of the last message at the top. Messages have a rollover-able title that shows how long ago the comment was made. Any words with “http://” in them will be converted into hyperlinks. WordPress smileys also work. WordPress users that are logged in automatically get their nickname filled in, and other users’ names get stored for later use. No iFrames, ever. 100% valid XHTML strict
New in Version 1.16
Extensive updates to the readme. Check all the FAQs there before asking me/ New feature: Checkbox for only allowing registered users to participate in the chat. View changeset If you’ve got 1.15 and don’t need the new feature, this is not an essential download.
New in Version 1.15
Multibyte characters are no longer truncated, fixing many i18n problems URLs typed into the shoutbox now work correctly Added #wordspew wrapper div Insignificant tweaks View changeset
New in Version 1.14
Plenty of code cleanup. Resetting user name and URL is now possible. Fixes bug when writing URLs in the text box Small CSS Tweaks Working from the WP-Plugins.org Repository.
New in Version 1.13
The css is now compatible with the Rin theme. Textareas now submit when a user presses the return key. Found a much better way to achieve the i18n code, so it is more compact Tweaked the algorithm a bit to be even more efficient. Tweaked the FAT script so making new messages in rapid succession doesn’t make the fade stutter Squashed Admin panel bug that showed slashes when editing messages. Single words are now cut to 25 letters before adding a space. However, URLs are never cut. Killed teensy bug that sometimes submits the message when it isn’t done Added code to allow for censoring words. It’s commented out by default, but you can add it if you want. Just search for ‘CENSOR’
New in Version 1.12
Extensive internationalization improvements. All UTF8 characters are accepted. Wordspew now always translates entities to unicode. As a result, a lot of the code shrunk. Yay! Renamed
jal_getID to jal_deleteOldNew in Version 1.11 (wordspew.php diff & fatAjax.php diff)
Uses an algorithm to compute user activity to lessen the server load. Here’s how it works:
The shoutbox loads messages at the given rate in the admin panel (default: 4 seconds) for the first 10 times. After that, it multiplies the
rate by 5/4 (1.25). This rate dictates how often the javascript pings the server for new messages. So roughly, after 20 minutes of complete inactivity, the ping interval is 20 minutes. After 5 minutes, the interval is around 2 minutes. This way,
if a user leaves their browser open, the server won’t suffer. There are many ways for the interval to be reset. First of all, if the shoutbox ever discovers new messages, it will reset back to the default rate.
Also, if a user ever mouses over the shoutbox, the form will reset. If they mouseover after being absent for more than 10 data loads, the data will reload right away. This prevents users from mousing over in rapid succession and killing the server. If none of this made sense to you, don’t worry about it. It’s a Good Thingâ„¢!
Fixes bug where slashes appeared in the admin data display. Fixes validity bug where a form was marked as rate by 5/4 (1.25). This rate dictates how often the javascript pings the server for new messages. So roughly, after 20 minutes of complete inactivity, the ping interval is 20 minutes. After 5 minutes, the interval is around 2 minutes. This way,
if a user leaves their browser open, the server won’t suffer. There are many ways for the interval to be reset. First of all, if the shoutbox ever discovers new messages, it will reset back to the default rate.
Also, if a user ever mouses over the shoutbox, the form will reset. If they mouseover after being absent for more than 10 data loads, the data will reload right away. This prevents users from mousing over in rapid succession and killing the server. If none of this made sense to you, don’t worry about it. It’s a Good Thingâ„¢!
method="GET" instead of method="get". Fixed problem where shoutbox always declared that the total messages ever made was 35.Version 1.102 fixes a tiny bug where the last message turned into 35 years. Now fixed.
New in Version 1.1 (Diff)
Delete All Messages button in the admin panel Sanitized all MySQL inserts, updates, and deletes Added support for non-js browsers. Now any browser can use the chat! Fixed Took all javascript Events from the HTML and added them to the external javascript. Now requires only one message at all times The latest comment is no longer loaded with javascript. All the information is in the browser on load. Cleaned up code everywhere Fixed rare bug where URLs for the javascript and css files didn’t cooperate. CSS is a little better looking now. Fixed abstract bug that occured when someone writes multiple messages in rapid succession.
New in Version 1.0 FINAL
Addresses huge security problems in previous versions. In order to protect users still not using the latest version, I won’t say what the problems were. Added optional support for textareas for bigger message boxes. Added optional support for URL boxes. Works in Opera 8 now! Fixed a few problems with huge URLs. This version is a modification of 1.1 Alpha.
New in Version 1.1 Alpha
Added support for a URL box. Installation is now a piece of cake. Just activate the plugin and it goes.
New in Version 1.0 RC2
Hopefully got rid of bug in RC1 that wouldn’t allow for directory installs. Got rid of the
sql[] array in the install-live.php. It’s now a string.New in Version 1.0 RC1
Well I think Wordspew has finally matured to stable form. Many great changes in this version: Should work with WordPress URL and Site URL set differently If there are less than two messages, admin panel doesn’t freeze up. New feature: Counts the number of messages every made and displays it in the Admin panel User name cookies don’t expire after one session…They are saved for later use. Fixed a potential problem with invalid HTML infiltrating the shoutbox Optimized some code, and deleted old unused functions.
New in Version 0.71
User names now stored in a cookie if they aren’t logged in. Intelligently checks to see if there has been a change. New variable added:
$jal_number_of_comments. It is defined at the top of wordspew.php, and it determines how many posts to show at one time From now on, Wordspew will insert an with the version number inside. This helps me figure out problems when you contact me. A few tweaks to the readme.txt Hopefully soon I’ll give a couple tutorials on how to include the shoutbox on its own page and only allowing your users to see it, etc. Added a reminder of the default values of settings for the admin panelNew in Version 0.70.1:
This is a quick bug fix release. Fixed ‘ bug where it changed into a ? Added a few more FAQs. For all users of 0.70, I suggest you just change line 152 of
fatAjax.php to s = s.replace(/\'/g, '%27');New in Version 0.70:
Unicode should work perfectly now.. Full support for links in smilies
Spans now have titles that tell when the comment was posted. But new comments and all comments handled by javascript do not have titles. This is because Last Message can handle it. Sent comments are now escaped, so that & works and potentially non-english characters as well. All three files are changed, so make sure to upload all three if you are upgrading. You don’t need to reinstall it though. Users innerHTML on comments, so it’s easier to add html (smilies and links). All other HTML is stripped. If Wordspew is not displayed, because of a if (!is_single()) conditional, it no longer produces Javascript errors. Big thanks to Astrobot and ZZ85 for help on this version.New in Version 0.64:
Got rid of Admin panel bug that caused a fatal error redeclaring some functions Thanks Astrobot! Got rid of bug when there were less than two messages in the shoutbox.. Replaced all instances of < ? with
