My client has asked me to investigate chat software for their website which I am in the process of building. I'm not very familiar with such software as I work with PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS exclusively.
I need some advice on what software to go for and have no idea how to choose, so here's some details that may or may not be useful:
The site is hosted on a LAMP server (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).
The budget is very small - preferably nil for this software.
The client would like to set up a "live chat" facility which has a special guest chatter and then registered users can join the chat.
They would like to be able to filter the messages in real time to avoid offensive questions/comments - so an administrator facility.
The chat would need to open at a certain time and close at a certain time, controlled by the administrator - either predefined or manually opened and closed.
Only one chat at a time.
Chat software is switched off at all other times
Ideally the software will plug into the existing site design rather than open in a separate and stylistically different page
Well, there are a number of solutions already out on the web. (Right now is time for me to plug Chategory )
Really, I'd recommend searching Sourceforge.net or Google. Really, I think something like a Java applet would be best suited for chatting, but if you're on a LAMP setup, then search around the php options. I've seen numerous php based chat systems (that I can't at the moment find).
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