Plugin Name: Rudd-O's Wordspew
Plugin URI: http://rudd-o.com/projects/wordspew/
Description: A live shoutbox with online user tracking and new messages fade-in for WordPress
Author: Rudd-O
Version: 2.1
Author URI: http://rudd-o.com/

WHAT'S THIS?

Rudd-O's Wordspew is an improved edition of the widely known shoutbox (live Web chat box) created by Andrew Sutherland, the Jalenack's Wordspew.

WHY ANOTHER SHOUTBOX?

How did it come to life?  Well, it's simple.  Three factors were at play here:

- Jalenack's Wordspew contained a serious SQL injection vulnerability.  I intended to fix that ASAP.  And I did.
- One day, seeing the wp-useronline link that I had purposefully placed above the shoutbox, it hit me: what if the shoutbox itself tracked visitors, instead of using a separate plugin?  What if the visitor count and nickname roster were updated live, in real time, so you'd know if the person you were chatting with went away?  Thus, I decided to integrate the useronline plugin with Jalenack's Wordspew.  And it truly makes sense, because now everyone reading my weblog will appear as online until they navigate away from my weblog.  Plus, the useronline code merged with Jalenack's Wordspew has fixes for bugs present in the original version.
- The original Wordspew was filling my Web server logs with PHP notices (due to coding slip-ups in the original implementation).  Being the cautious individual that I am, I did not want to turn notices off.  I fixed this slip-up
- The original implementation of the shoutbox had a few hard-to-track JavaScript bugs, which caused error notices when pages containing it were saved as Konqueror Web archives.  Other JavaScript errors caused visitors to involuntarily hit on the AJAX-invoked wordspew.php file one too many times (often bogging down my Web server).  I fixed these bugs.

FEATURES:

So, here's the lowdown on Rudd-O's Wordspew:

- No SQL injection bugs.  Honest!
- Live update of who's online and chatting, with real nicknames
- Easier on the Web server

Here it is.  For you to peruse and download.  So, do it now!

HOW TO INSTALL

Just unpack the archive into your WordPress installation's wp-content/plugins directory (preserving the directory structure, so a wordspew directory with all its files should be created).  Then go to the Plugin manager screen in your WordPress administration interface, and enable Rudd-O's Wordspew.  That's it!

To place your shoutbox within your template, add the following code (a good place for this code would be the sidebar.php file):

<?php if (function_exists("jal_get_shoutbox")) { ?>
	<h2>Live chat</h2>
	<?php jal_get_shoutbox(); ?>
<?php } ?>

LICENSE

This work is distributed and licensed to you under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license.  Read its terms at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/.