Name	Chat Plugin
Author(s)
Priority	High
Description	A web-based chat plugin with transcripts

Description

I'd like to offer a real-time, group-based, persistent chat inside a Confluence page. The main purpose of this plugin would be to allow groups to have an online discussion between multiple parties, collaborate over Confluence content with a real-time backchannel, and keep a permanent record of the conversation, which would then become searchable by Confluence search.

This Chat plugin is specifically not about person-to-person IM. There are plenty of good systems for that already, and we incorporate them to a small degree already with the IM Presence Plugin.

Implementation

Any user can create a new chatroom by placing a chat macro on a page, like this: chat:My Room Name. That macro will render an HTML table that contains information: name, last activity, participants, files uploaded, transcripts by date, as well as a big link that says "Join Chat."

Clicking the "Join Chat" link will launch a new popup window with no broswer chrome, but containing the chat-room UI. Across the top should be a title. Down the right side should be an info panel. At the bottom is the input area and submit button, and in the middle should be the content window. Just like regular IM, content should be appended to the bottom of the page and it should gradually scroll off the top. As each participant submits a message, it appears on the other screens with name and timestamp.

Whenever there is activity in the chat room, it should log the conversation. That conversation should be stored on a child page of the chat-room page, separated by date – probably one page for a full day's transcript. If there is no activity that day, don't create a transcript page. The transcripts should be formatted as close to the original as possible.

Permissions should be handled by using the permissions of the page on which the chat-room macro occurs. The Chat will also take the parent page's CEO id as it's id, in order to ensure uniqueness.

Use Cases

Features

Beyond the basic chat feature, we could also add:

• Wiki-rendering of messages, or at least wiki-link rendering.
• Paste-support, that allows you to view pasted content at full size and formatted as <pre>.
• Sound. We could make a beep when a new message appears.

References

• http://www.oregano-server.org/ - we could try to use this as a backend.

Screenshots

Here are a couple of very simple wireframes that describe what I'm imagining.