Just because I don’t work for DotNetNuke anymore, doesn’t mean I am done with this fabulous platform. For my new gig at ClubReady (, I started this past Monday) I am not doing DotNetNuke related work, but I am still working on the web. I was doing some research and testing with SignalR, if you want to find out what it is, click on the link there and check it out. In short, it allows for webpages and apps to have an open pipe between the client and the server, allowing you to send information back and forth with ease.
Because I was working with it at the office, and I wanted to learn more, late last week (I think around 1130pm on Tuesday night) I decided I was going to see if I could get it working inside of a DotNetNuke module. 30 Minutes later the SignalRChat module for DotNetNuke was functional and I had created a project on the DotNetNuke Forge/Codeplex, for it.
Since then I have put out two additional releases of the module, v00.00.02 and v00.00.03, and have had a variety of people connect to the demo website and test it. You can see the module in action on my newly created website https://www.dnnchat.com/
So what is the SignalRChat module? It is a very simple chat module for DotNetNuke (requires DNN 7.0.2 or newer) that provides a few basic features.
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Simple chat interface
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Ability to use Display Name from users that are logged in
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Ability for users to change their name in the chat with “/nick NEWNAME” entered into the chat window
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Shows connections and disconnections
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Admins can set a “Message of The Day” that displays for a user when they connect to the chat.
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Shows the total number of user’s connected
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Logs all connections and messages in the DNN database using DAL2
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All HTML is stripped from entry
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Completely open source (C#)
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MIT open source license
As of right now I have a few additional features I would like to add to the module, in all likely hood they will be there in a couple of days
Additional features will also likely be added. If you’d like to contribute ideas for the module put them in the Issues area of the Codeplex page, you can also ask questions and discuss the module in the Discussions are on Codeplex.
Download
Want to download the SignalRChat module? Head on over to the Downloads page.
So now, the next question most developers will ask, how do you implement SignalR in DotNetNuke modules? I promise I will blog about that later this week, though I assure you it is pretty darn easy to do with DotNetNuke 7.
Announcing dnnCHAT.com
Looking for a way to showcase the SignalRChat module I registered dnnCHAT.com a couple of days ago and tonight got it setup as a demo site for the module. Though I envision this website being more than just a demo of the module, I hope that people use it to learn more about DotNetNuke. With all the community aspects of DotNetNuke.com, there isn’t really anything conducive to real-time discussions, I hope that dnnCHAT helps people to talk more about DNN.
To get things kicked off, on Monday February 25th, at 10:30pm EST I will be sitting down in the chat room, along with @OliverHine and we will be answering DNN related questions. I hope to see more of these types of things happen in the future, but we need to get the first one under our belt and see how the module works with a number of people connected.