Chatting options

While Skype is a nice short-term solution, it has its drawbacks. Not everybody uses Skype, and Skype was conceived to make calls, and that's what it does best.

i'm looking for a web-based (free)chat application that we can use on our servers to host discussions on.

We have dhchat in the addons, but it's old and unsupported, so I'm not sure if we should risk it on our servers.

I also found phpfreechat, ajaxchat and phpopenchat. I'm trying out the first 2, as the last one had a latest release in 2005.

Any other tools that can be installed on our current PHP server you know of?

I think IRC is much more easier. You can setup in a lot of programs, like Thunderbird, Pidgin or else.

You need enter a user name, a server (chat.freenode.net) and the room name #impresscms

The benefit is, it's works on any platforms.

I considered IRC as well, but web-based chat seemed easier to find php-based clients for.

The downside is that you need to have specific sofware installed, so from that point of view, IRC is not better than skype.

I want to concentrate things as much as possible on the website. If there is a good PHP IRC client available somewhere, that would be a perfect match.

I'll see if I find one that is easy to setup. Does anyone has experience with a specific web-based client or library perhaps?

http://mibbit.com/ is very good tool for chatting in IRC.

Also, I experimented with Jabber and iCMS. I think is better solution. Because You can chat by using own gmail account. However I wasn't succefull. Frameworks that use Jabber are not very easy to understand :(

mibbit looks nice. I'll see if we can organise a test in the near future.
I seem to remember Google did some tiny changes of their own to make GTalk 'non-standard'. It would be cool to do though.

Thanks for the mibbit link, didn't found out about that one before!

I looked at mibbit, and also at KiwiIRC. I'll try to see if I can get KiwiIRC included on the site.

Jabber would be nice, but I don't know of any integrated web-based solutions (that we don't have to setup ourselves). We don't have the expertise in the team to set something like that up.