General Intro

I’m Alan Morgan, and this is a place to host some of the code work that I’m doing. Some of it has already been mentioned over at my technical blog, but I want to use that more for general tech talk and less about my personal coding projects.

I’ve also set up a Trac bug tracking / wiki system, and SVN for source code control. You can file new bugs and add updates to tickets, and check out code from SVN if you want bleeding-edge versions. Standard disclaimer applies; non-release code is use at your own risk (not that released code isn’t as well, it just has a higher expectation of being stable at any given point in time– I don’t make any commitment to keeping trunk free of incomplete changes all the time).

First two projects I’ll mention are StormChat and FriendsManager.

StormChat

StormChat is a two-fold project; it’s a back-end server written in C and a front-end web interface written in PHP. I’ve seen many different web chat systems through the years and I’ve been disappointed in them for a variety of reasons. Some things I meant to address with StormChat was:

• Stay away from Java. Java-based chats usually suck, with few exceptions. On older computers, they often don’t work at all.
• Avoid using just PHP. The ideal scenario is using the multi-threaded back-end server over server push. While this shouldn’t be the only option, a lot of the chats out there don’t give you a server push option, which is just bad.
• Price points. Seriously, some of the dollar figures I’ve seen floating around for simple web chat software has been ridiculous. SC is open-source, so you can audit, extend, and redistribute the code however you please.
• Customization. It shouldn’t be a major PITA to add new features to a chat system, but a lot of the ones I’ve played with have had no options to extend, or poor documentation and hard to understand code. SC is designed to offer very easy plugin management, and allows your plugins to automatically add their own documentation to the help page. And I have several example plugins which I’ve developed for some of the writing sites I’ve administered.
• Integration with an existing database. I assume that you already have some type of forum/blog/etc. before you install SC; it’s hard to have a chat-only community with nothing else. Down the road I’ll add some stand-alone functionality, but it should be easy to integrate with external projects, which is also something I’ve found lacking on other chat systems.

There are many issues with SC as it currently stands, but I haven’t been actively developing it for some time. By setting milestones and making a roadmap, I plan on addressing some of the bigger issues up front and getting people involved to find some of the bugs that I’ve missed.

• Installer. I’ve got one partially written, but it really needs an overhaul. That’s item #1.
• Initial FAL (forum abstraction layer) code will support the following projects:
  • LiveJournal Communities
  • phpBB 3.x
  • SMF 1.x
  • WordPress 2.x

FriendsManager

FriendsManager is a LUA add-on for World of Warcraft. It’s designed to work like FriendsFacts and FriendsShare, integrating them both into one mod and acting as a framework for future features (keeping track of people by main/alt, etc.).