Chatting is something that makes a community site seem so much more vibrant and dynamic. I had looked into chatting options using contributed modules to Drupal 6 at one point but never implemented any of them.

But recently I was contracted to write a simple RealChat module for Drupal 6 that allows users of a Drupal 6 site to chat easily using a RealChat server. On clicking a link, users automatically start a chat session with their Drupal username as their "nickname", Drupal picture for "avatar", and profile on the Drupal site linked to their chatting account. The chat link is made authenticatable if the chat server's authentication key is entered on the ReaChat administrative settings page. This allows the chat server to trust chat sessions from your Drupal site and reject others.

My plans are to have this be my first contributed Drupal module and to implement it with the free 5-user test chat server on Composers' Village. I will update this story with progress on these fronts.

UPDATE 1: (July 19, 2009) See the RealChat module at drupal.org.

UPDATE 2: (October 9,2009) Chatting enabled with the RealChat module can now be used at Composers' Village. The chat server is running on a VPS using Ubuntu 8 and LAMP since Cronen-Townsend Consulting's shared hosting could not handle this use. To have your name and picture automatically set you must get a Composers' Village account.