Dizkus

This is a quick hack to the News-Article and News-Index templates of your Xanthia theme to include an article-specific "IRC Chat about this" link next to the "Print this" and "Email this" links of your News stories. I haven't seen it used elsewhere, but I thought it might be useful for those really HOT news stories that you just GOTTA talk to someone else about.

Each Article's chatroom will be open to the public, though only the people who find it by clicking on the News Article's "Chat about this" link at your site are gonna know what the chatroom is about. Also, the chatrooms aren't permanent. They're meant to be disposable. They're just sort of quick, community-buzz feature.

The IRC link works in Opera 8.52 (as is), IE6 (with mIRC), Firefox 1.5.0.1 (with IRC client). More info about mIRC at: http://www.mirc.com/mirclink.html. Other OS chat clients at: http://www.ircreviews.org/clients/

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Add the following to your Xanthia theme's global.php file:


Then add the following (with substitutions) to your theme's News-index.htm and News-article.htm templates:


NOTES:

Substitute your favorite IRC server for the words "MY_FAVORITE_IRC_SERVER" above.
A list of IRC servers can be found at: http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/networks/

Substitute your site name (or a shortened form of your site name) for the words "MY_SITE" above, so that the link doesn't accidentally link to someone else's chatroom. Remember that the irc server might automatically trim the chatroom name (which includes your Article's ID!) if "MY_SITE" has too many characters, so keep it short--and no spaces!

The Article's ID will be automatically supplied by

The edited line will end up looking something like this:


See a working demo at: http://www.democracynowMICHIGAN.org/

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Any suggestions/comments/improvements to this hack would be appreciated.

samuraichamploo



edited by: samuraichamploo, Jun 04, 2006 - 04:52 AM