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August 1, 2016

Slack Chat: Chatting with Visitors on a Drupal Site

Since we switched to Slack as the primary means of communication at work, Slack has grown to be my favorite chat application. Not only does it have a very pleasant interface, but it also offers great ways to integrate it with your application. As a matter of fact, their API is among the least restrictive ones in my experience. As a result of the joy of working the Slack API, Slack chat module was born to serve as a proof of concept for embedded Drupal-to-Slack chat functionality. Using Slack chat module, you can add a chat widget to your Drupal site that your visitors can use to chat with…

June 28, 2016

Extending Drupal's Node.js Integration

The Node.js integration Drupal module offers an API that allows developers to add real-time push notification functionality to their modules. Real-time communication could enable features like chat, pop-up notifications, or real-time content update. Chatroom is a great example of how a module can leverage Node.js. What does Node.js integration do? When a visitor opens a page on which the Node.js module is enabled, the client-side JavaScript opens a socket connection between the visitor's browser and the Node.js server. The Node.js server runs the drupal-nodejs application that communicates…

June 15, 2016

Customer Chat: Live Customer Support for Drupal

E-commerce sites are more and more commonly offering live chat for their visitors as a way of customer support. There is a wide selection of modules for Drupal that can add this functionality. However, most, if not all, I found rely on third party chat services. A while ago, I decided to build a native live chat module in connection with a project of mine. The module has been released as Customer chat. The primary interface of Customer chat module is a dashboard that site agents can use to accept incoming chats from visitors. This page shows all the active chats that are relevant to the…