Joomla Site Owners - Here's how to implement a Free Chat / Shoutbox that works!
Written by Rak-Wholesale.com, on 25-03-2008 12:45
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Adding a sense of community is sometimes a challenge with Joomla. Since the CMS doesn't come loaded with community features, adding forums, reviews, chats and such involves a lot of searching, researching, installing, configuring, reconfiguring and well uninstalling before you get the features you need working properly on your site.

Here is a way to add a free chat box / shoutbox, to your Joomla powered site.

Follow the following steps, and chat is running on your site in less than 5 minutes:

If you don't already have a way of adding custom code to your module positions without escaping the WYSIWYG curse (you know what I mean right?), a great extension that does the job right out of the box and works with Joomla 1.0/1.5 is Bob Galway's Blank Module 1.0.

1) To install this module:
  • From the Joomla admin panel --> Extensions --> Install/Uninstall
  • Browse to find the file you downloaded from the Joomla extension directory
  • Click on Upload File & Install
2) Grab the shout box code:
3) Now to create the shout box module on your site:
  • From the Joomla admin panel --> Extensions --> Module Manager --> NEW
  • Select Blank Module 15 from your choices and click Next
  • Name your Module, choose whether to display the title, select module position
  • In Module parameters (Place your html code snippet in this box >>>): place the code you generated for your box.
  • Customize your module positions
  • Enable
  • Save
  • VOILE!!

This is a true Shoutout Box for your site. If you want a chatting application with multiple rooms and chat with users from other sites, see this article....

***One final tip: if you want to change the size of the box to fit into your selected module position, find this line in the code snippet : "height='270' width='200'" and change it to fit your template!
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