We just made a screencast showing how to install our chat module on your Joomla 1.7 site. You can see it below:

Things began at 10am on Sunday when 14 hackers made their project pitches and formed teams around their ideas.

About 30 sleepless hours later the hackers were ready to present. We saw an awesome number of pitches, including Morning Person, created by Bill Ma and Song Zheng, who won for the best Envolve implementation. Morning person is a social tool to get you up and running, it provides the day’s news and weather and the ability to chat about them. Here is Zac Bowling pitching HAPI Wall, a social homepage for conferences and events.

The API’s present that hackers could use were:

Some of the new developer features include:

• Grouping – Users can be placed in groups with other users. Each user in a group will see the other members in their group in the “people here” list. Each user can be a member of multiple groups. For an example of this in action, check out VIP Society. Here they’ve created a concept called ‘families’. Each member of a family is able to see and communicate with other members of the same family.
• Embedded chats - Chats can now be embedded directly in the page. For an example, check this out.
• Programmatic creation of chats – For sites that require chats to be created on-the-fly, we’ve added the ability for site owners to generate chats as needed. This can be done by adding just a small piece of javascript to your webpage. These chats can be placed either in the toolbar or directly in a <div> on the page.
• Custom profile rollovers – Sites can customize their members profile rollovers specifically to their needs. To see this in action, place your mouse over a user’s name in the chat. For example, Empire avenue uses custom profile rollovers so that it is easy to see another member’s stock price.

Full documentation for our developer API is available here. We have ready-made libraries for Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, C#, and Perl.

The developer features we are launching today will enable sites to create powerful real-time features for their communities. However, we have much more planned for the future including support for friend lists, mobile capabilities, full CSS customization, and much more! Please get in touch if you have suggestions or feedback.

In order to showcase our new features, we’ve created a couple of demonstration apps.

1) Envo.lv – This app lets you quickly layer a chat toolbar on any website. It demonstrates our grouping and programatic creation of chats.

2) Tagch.at – This is a better interface for Twitter hashtag chats. It uses our embedded chats.

We’re excited to see what developers build on our platform. Happy chatting!

vBulletin is one of the most popular platforms for website communities and has been the standard platform for forums since the early 2000′s. Due to its continuing popularity, tight knit web communities and demand from you, our customers, we decided to make some significant improvements to our vBulletin chat plugin. This updated release provides users with a much more integrated chatting experience.

Sample custom profile rollover from StarHawkCenter.net

Our new vBulletin chat mod features include:

• Avatar support
• Profile picture support
• Site owners can choose between profile pictures or avatars
• Site owners can choose which user groups can use Envolve
• Ability to specify which users are chat admins
• Custom chat profiles that link to the user’s profile
• SSL Support

If you’d like the new and improved version of Envolve chat for your vBulletin community, download our chat mod from vBulletin.org here, and remember to ‘Mark as Installed’ and please give us a review/rating! You can also see vBulletin chat installation instructions here.

We hope that this new update will increase our presence on the vBulletin platform and eventually become the hosted chat plugin of choice for vB users. Many vB website communities and forum boards already greatly benefit from installing a real-time chat solution on their site. TVAlly is one of our vBulletin customers that has already seen how Envolve can turn their forum visitors into members and add value to their web community. This is what they had to say:

“As we at www.tvally.com streamed the Casey Anthony trial, we launched the Envolve Chat app to accommodate the live stream. We found this marriage to encourage new member growth. As ‘guest chatters’ arrived on our site, they quickly became ‘envolved’ in the chat app. The chat application was set to direct visitors to our registration page after X amount of posts. Thank you Envolve! I think we are onto someting here .

Scott Reiboldt
Administrator
www.TVAlly.com “

Finally, we would like to give a big thank you to StarHawkCenter.net for testing our new plugin and providing us with feedback! The sample picture above was captured from their site. Thank you everyone at StarHawkCenter!

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Download our updated vBulletin mod.

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James -

Thanks for the note. The addition of Envolve was _exactly_ what I’ve needed to build a bigger community between my web site visitors. It installed in so easily in WordPress, and it was up and running error-free in 10 minutes. Maybe a little less.

Then, I watched what happened. I announced it on my Facebook page, and suddenly everyone had moved the conversation to my site, sending me direct messages, opening new chat rooms, and conversing with each other.

It was AMAZING. I’m really, really impressed at what you’re building.

Please send thanks from myself and my online “students” to your team. You really have no idea how this changes everything for us.

Or, maybe you do.

- James “Professor” Messer

http://www.professormesser.com/

Update: Facebook Posts from Prof. Messer

Feedback about Envolve Chat from Professor Messer

This video explains how to edit the skins on our facebook style chat. Within these settings, you can edit the color of the main bar, text boxes, borders, colors for certain text, administrator user names, and more! These options allow you to create a personalized chat bar that fits perfectly into the theme of your website.

Lacuna Expanse is an example of a site that has used our custom skin feature.

Install our chat bar for free today!

This video is a quick tutorial on installing Envolve’s Joomla chat Plugin. We offer a chat solution for your Joomla powered website that is simple to install and easy to use! If you need a chat for your website, this is it! Our current plugin supports Joomla 1.5.

Download our Joomla plugin and leave us some feedback!

Check out our Joomla instructions for more information

You can download the WordPress plugin and see further instructions here

We are one of over 14,000 plugins in the WordPress plugin directory. Please leave us some feedback!

Also, check out FanBro. They are an active site that uses our WordPress plugin.