Chat

Liferay's Chat portlet gives you a convenient way of allowing your users to send each other instant messages when they are logged into your web site. It appears as a bar at the bottom of every page, showing who is logged on, their statuses, and any chats the logged-in user has had open.

Illustration 80: Liferay's Chat PortletThe Chat portlet is very simple to use. To change the settings, click Settings (found near the lower right corner next to Online Friends). Here you can set your status, whether to show if you are online, and whether to play a sound if someone sends you a message while you have the window or tab in the background.

The portlet shows you the number of your friends who are online. To chat with one of them, click the Online Friends link and then click the friend's name. You can then begin chatting with him or her. You can have multiple chats open at a time, and even have one or more of them minimized.

The Chat portlet is distributed with the Liferay bundles, but is not included as part of the .war distribution, as it is a separate plugin. If you installed the Liferay .war manually on your application server, you can install the Chat portlet by going to the Control Panel, clicking Plugins Installation, and then clicking the Install More Portlets button. Find the Chat portlet in the list, click on it, and then click Install.