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You have your members adding their avatars now as we covered in the first part

But what do we need now, every social network has some sort of communication between members going on, and for this project nothing will change. We want members to be able to send messages to each other as well as to the administrator.

Why?

For a start it promotes interaction between members and if someone is friends with another member they don’t want to be sending email after email which can get a bit boring .

More…

* Promote interaction between members
* Promote friendship
* More private than emails
* Easier than emails
* Alot more private than comments

The Setup

The plugin we will use is simple to use and does everything you would expect.

XDTalk has a great backup forum for any problems you may get and I can’t answer.

Upload the plugin to your wordpress installation using the following.

Simply download the plugin and unzip it to a folder on your desktop. Ive created a folder called ‘MattNutts’ everything I will use for this site will be kept in that folder so its easy to get to and I know where everything is.

For this you will need an ftp transfer programme so you can upload the unzipped files to your webserver I use CuteFTP but there is plenty of others out there.

Simple steps to add the plugin and get it working.

1 Click on the link to download the file then extract the files to the folder you have created for the files.To create a folder right click the desktop and select new and then folder.

2 Start up your ftp software and enter the details for your server, these will most likely be Username, Host, Password and Site Name.

3 You need to upload the files to /wp-content/plugins if you have installed wordpress into a subfolder other than the Site Root (the first area your ftp will find) you will need to browse to it, it could be something like - wordpress/wp-content/plugins. The easiest way to tell if you are using a subfolder is to browse to your wordpress homepage for mine I just type in http://mattnutts.com yours could be the same but your site name or it could have extras after it like .com/wordpress or .com/myblog

4 When you see the folder open it so you are inside your plugins folder on your server then select the xdtalk folder and drag it over to the plugin folder, the upload should start and everything will transfer over.

Once this is done head over to your wordpress admin area and activate the plugin, you will see some errors as the database hasn’t been created yet so head over to Manage and then click on XD Talk Admin save the settings and the database will becreated and the errors will be gone.

You can now alter the settings before you add the code to the sidebar, so you may want to alter the colours that will appear in the sidebar, the colours seperate the list so you can see which members are active and which are not. The cours can be changed using something like ‘light blue’ or hex for the colour ie, #ff0000 . This can be useful for getting the cours to match your site and make it easy to spot who is online and who isn’t.

To get the code to appear in the sidebar is

<?php
if (function_exists(”xdtalk_echo_sidebar_setup”)){
xdtalk_echo_sidebar_setup();
}
?>

It may work for you it may not for my theme I had to edit the sidebar and add the following

<?php
xdtalk_echo_sidebar_setup();
?>

Its only a simple messaging system but I will cover more in future posts on how to make this an exceptional piece of kit for your blog.

At the moment members get a popup box with the chat if someone messages them, you can see who is online and via the colours how long it has been since they were around red being active and blue being cold, with various colours inbetween.

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