Setting up a quick chat demo

Introduction

babble.demo sets up a fully configured and running Babble instant messaging environment for Plone.

It’s intended as a demo and aid to help integrators familiarise themselves with how Babble works and what it has to offer.

All the eggs (currently) related to Babble are installed. These are:

• babble.server:

  • The Zope messaging service. This service should ideally be run in it’s own dedicated server or Zeo client (as in this case).

• babble.client:

  • The Plone client side program. This provides the main chat functionality such as the online contacts portlet and the chat boxes.

• actionbar.panel:

  • This add-on is not directly associated with Babble and is not a requirement of it. It provides an extendablee action panel that hovers at the bottom of the screen.

• actionbar.babble:

  • The Babble extention for actionbar.panel. It provides a special action-box that provides a list of currently online users. Additionally, chatboxes are docked on this panel.

Steps to get a running system:

babble.demo provides its own buildout configuration file, plone4.cfg.

You should use this file, together with buildout, to create a new Zope/Plone instance.

In the examples below, assume that the python version is 2.6.* with PIL (the python imaging library) installed:

python bootstrap.py -c plone4.cfg

./bin/buildout -c plone4.cfg

The buildout will install a Zeo server running on port 2000 with two clients, instance on port 8080 and chatserver on port 8081.

supervisor is installed to manage these processes. After the buildout has completed succesfully, start the supervisor:

./bin/supervisord

You can check on the commandline wether the processes started succesfully:

./bin/supervisorctl status

Or in your browser by visiting http://localhost:9000, with username and password ‘admin’.

Now, in your browser, go to http://localhost:8080, and click on the Create a new Plone site button. In the next page, choose babble.demo from the list of ‘add-ons’ and then click Create Plone site.

Babble and the ActionBar should now be installed and correctly configured.

Head to http://localhost:8080/Plone/@@usergroup-userprefs, and add some users.

Happy Babbling!