Hi all
I am using moodle 2.7.2+
we need one plugin which help us to create chat rooms and facebook like chat in moodle. can you suggest any plugins for this or any external php plugins
Have you tried the chat activity that comes standard with Moodle?
Hi moodle learner,
Chat functionality in Moodle isn't what it should be and this is a shame considering Moodle's foundation on social constructivist principles - Users need to be able to get in touch with each other more spontaneously thereby enabling spontaneous participation and collaboration in learning communities. I think this is why many Moodle users opt to go to commercial 3rd party services like Google+, Facebook, and Twitter.
You can enable the chat daemon, which will make chat sessions more responsive: https://docs.moodle.org/30/en/Chat_settings#Site_administration_settings This requires command line access to the server. However, stopping the chat daemon isn't documented and the best way I found to stop it was to restart the entire server.
There are a number of 3rd party chat plugins, most of which offer to integrate their chat services with your Moodle, usually for a fee.
Getting acceptable performance in real time chat is technically difficult, is additionally difficult if you have to keep to what comes with PHP, and quickly becomes very difficult if you have more than a small number of people. I am happy if Moodle HQ put minimal effort into improving chat in core and concentrate on things that are hard to find elsewhere (e.g. quiz/assignment submission etc etc). There is no point in trying to compete feature for feature with Google, Facebook and the like.
I have made a chat plugin in PHP (although not for Moodle) that is very friendly for server resources.
I used websockets together with ZeroMQ (http://zeromq.org/). Client connects to an endpoint on page load, and after that server takes care of pushing the messages to the client in real time when necessary. Thanks to this there is no need for polling, and the server can easily handle even a large group of users.
Thanks to all for your valuable feedbacks.
Matt : can you suggest a few 3 rd party chat applications that i can integrate with moodle.
One other possibility...Skype has individual chat, plus other capabilities, such as screen sharing and it's normal audio or video calling, as long as the students have a Skype user name...and there is a Moodle Skype plugin. Skype is free to use from computer-to-computer.