Adding Discussion Boards and Chat Rooms

[ocollier]

I am sure it has been asked about incorporating a discussion board module into the blogharbor software. I would love to offer my visitors a place where they could chat and discuss issues of their own concerns.

Being that this does not exist, what suggestions would anyone offer about adding a discussion board to my blog and making it blend in so that the average person does not even realize they have left the blog site?

Are there any services where I can add a pop up chat window for my users. Maybe something that I can create inside a component and place it on my blog layout.

I want to make my blog more interactive.

[john]

I don't have any specific suggestions as to 3rd party discussion forums or chat add ons, but when you find one you like you could create a special type of post we call a Web Page (not a great name, but you can read how to create them here) which is a page within your blog that is not linked to a category or displayed like an article with a date, subject, etc. The body area of the page is entirely open for your content; there's no comments, trackbacks, titles, dates, author name, and so on.

You might then use an IFRAME, or inline frame, which is a way to place external or remote content within your web document. A google search on the subject of IFRAMEs yielded these results:

http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/frames/_IFRAME.html
http://www.designplace.org/tutorials.php?page=1&c_id=1
http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/frames/inlineframes.html

[abacquer]

IFRAMEs rule in my opinion. I've used them a couple times in blog posts where I wanted to show off some javascript tool or other I had written, but I didn't want to embed the javascript/forms in the article in question.

You can see some IFRAMEs in action on my blog on the following articles:

Naming Elves and Babies

Cracking the Twenty Five Cent Code
_________________
-- Abacquer, A.K.A. Chuck Seggelin

[tenoarman]

Cbox works perfectly with BlogHarbor and probably most other places. I love it. Free and for-fee versions.

Update: Scratch that. Javascript that connects to external sites is not good. I deleted Cbox and Del.icio.us code as they both had server problems recently.

Some Wordpress blogs have chat boxes that are internal, and it'd be nice if one was available to us; in addition to being easy to install. Even just the last ten posts or so being accessible. I don't care if the archives disappear.