news

2004-12-01: I fixed a couple of longstanding bugs:

• the flash-of-unstyled-content plaguing users of internet explorer is now fixed.
• uninitialized variables are no longer filling up the php error logs

	    # $Id: README,v 1.3 2004/12/01 09:28:23 paul Exp $

NFG WebChat 1.1

INTRODUCTION

NFGWebChat is a single channel chat webapplication written in pure PHP. It
was designed with two major goals in mind: Scalability and Accessibility. 

First and foremost it should be very stable under heavy loads. It will
easily take as many connections as your webserver will allow. Reduction of
disk IO to the absolute minimum was achieved by sharing a single PHP session
between all clients. I've done some simple benchmarking with ApacheBench
(ab), and the results were impressive.

The second design goal was accessibility. NFGWebChat strives to be useful
with all modern browsers without any kind of plugin. So, no java, no flash,
period. Only a single javascript element was added to improve usability, but
everything will work just fine without it. The only requirement (for now) is 
cookie support, and even that should be trivial to remove sometime. The result
is pure and validated XHTML1 and CSS2. For the visually impaired a frameless 
view is offered as well.

INSTALLATION

NFGWebChat is a stand-alone php webapplication. It doesn't require any other
code apart from PHP4 with session support. It does NOT work with PHP3. Just 
unpack the tarball somewhere under your DOCUMENT_ROOT, rename the directory
to some nifty cool name, and access it through any browser. If you want to
log the chat make sure the tmp directory is writable for the webserver.

CUSTOMIZATION

You can edit style.css for the look-n-feel, and edit the templates to your
hearts desire. Just make sure you leave all the macros (%somevar%, etc) in
there.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright NFG Net Facilities Group BV, 2003. Released to the public under
the GNU Public Licence.

WARRANTY

None what so-ever :-)

AUTHORS

Paul Stevens paul@nfg.nl

# $Id: README,v 1.3 2004/12/01 09:28:23 paul Exp $

	    

	    2004-12-02 Paul Stevens 

	* lib.php: check for php-4.1.0 or better.
	* ChangeLog: release 1.2.1.
	
2004-11-30 Paul Stevens 

	* 1.2 release.
	* talk.tpl, index.tpl, nick.tpl, chat.tpl: fix the FOUC problem for
	IE users (Flash of unstyled content).
	* index.php: cleanup the warnings from uninitialized variables.
	* index.php, login.tpl, talk.tpl: add single javascript statement to
	set the focus to the login/talkback input element.

2003-03-04 Paul Stevens 

	* 1.1 release: fix a couple of trivial bugs.

2003-02-13 Paul Stevens 
    
	* initial release and freshmeat announcement.


$Id: ChangeLog,v 1.2 2004/12/02 08:28:05 paul Exp $