Integrating Chat into a Drupal Site

Recently I have been investigating different chat modules available in Drupal 7. Adding this capability to your site makes it easy for users to interact with one another encouraging more traffic towards your site.

In my search, I came across DrupalChat: an easy to use and extensible chat implementation for Drupal. Out of the box, I was already able to chat on my local development environment logged in as two different users. Albeit the responses were delayed due to the long polling method I had enabled, it is always nice to just turn something on and see it work. Afterwards I set out to create a DrupalChat server using nodejs (all the instructions are contained within the DrupalChat module). One make file later, I had a snappy, responsive chat that had that professional polish to be used in applications like Google and Facebook. I had multiple users set up, all talking to one another. The users are tied into the Drupal users so no log-in is required. As well, it maintained the chat history between page loads meaning I could continue to browse the site without losing any of my conversations. While this module is great out-of-the-box, I still would like it to have group chat working like Google Talk. However, I could envision easily extending and improving this module to be tailored to any site that requires chat.