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Paul Jackson
8,943 PointsHelp creating a simple Shoutbox?
I'm trying to create a simple Shoutbox for my Fantasy Football League page. All it needs to be is box with a space to enter their name, and then a space to type the message, and a body that holds previous messages.
Am I just looking at simple HTML and CSS for this? Or is it going to be a little harder than I thought?
3 Answers
Ryan Duchene
Courses Plus Student 46,022 PointsSo, like a basic chat window? Yeah, that's a little more complex than just HTML and CSS, unfortunately.
If you want to build it yourself (instead of using a third-party tool such as Gmail Chat), I'd even suggest using a framework like Rails or Laravel.
Rails is built in and uses the Ruby language. Jason gives an introduction to Ruby here and builds a simple app with Rails here.
Laravel is built in PHP. Randy will give you an introduction to PHP across three different courses (starting with this one), and Hampton will get you acquainted with object-oriented PHP. Hampton has also just released a Laravel course that I did a speedrun through today. (So good...)
But yeah, if you want to build a chat system, you're going to have to use a backend language. It'll be a little hard at first, but it's totally worth it.
If you're interested in my preference, I prefer Rails (using Ruby) to Laravel (using PHP) as far as frameworks go, and Ruby's syntax is absolutely gorgeous, but PHP is a LOT easier to pick up than Ruby is.
Paul Jackson
8,943 PointsAwesome. Seems like a lot of work for what I"m looking for on our FFootball league page. I'm definitely interested in learning all of that and am going to try to in the future. I was hoping for more of a quick fix right now though.
Thanks for the info anyways!
Paul Jackson
8,943 PointsCan I use Gmail Chat as a tool on my own league page?
Again, it's not something that anyone is going to have to login into. Just a place to post a blurb
Ryan Duchene
Courses Plus Student 46,022 PointsHangouts (same thing as Gmail Chat, just with a different name, because Google likes renaming things) has an API, but using that will require many of the same skills.
Ryan Duchene
Courses Plus Student 46,022 PointsRyan Duchene
Courses Plus Student 46,022 PointsWith that being said, if your website is running WordPress, this plugin might be of interest to you.