Private Messages

neoncube

Overview

Private Messages is, as the names suggests, an extension for adding private messages to your forum!

Private messages (PM's) are also known as "direct messages" (DM's). (e.g. "Send me a PM!" or "Send me a DM!")

Flarum Private Messages screenshot

Installation

composer require neoncube/flarum-private-messages:"*"

Updating

composer update neoncube/flarum-private-messages
php flarum migrate
php flarum cache:clear

Bugs/feature requests

If you run into an issue or have a feature request, please let me know by posting here or on Github, whichever is more convenient for you! 🙂

Migration

Anyone using the Whisper extension should be able to update to this extension without losing any private messages.

Credits

Thank you to @Kyrne, who made the original Whisper extension that this extension is mostly based off of, and thank you to David Wheatleu and CXM for their many bug fixes and contributions!

tom23

Are there any screenshots or a demo site?

neoncube

tom23 I've added a screenshot to the original post, above, and to neoncube2/flarum-private-messages . Thanks for the suggestion! 🙂

Capybara

Thanks, everything is working. I propose to fix it: if the message is longer than one line, the read status climbs onto the message, and is not displayed at the bottom. And I would like to change the background color of the messages

neoncube

Thanks, Capybara 🙂

I'm thinking it would make sense to move the read indicator to the left of the message, so that it takes up less space. What do you think?

I think the colors might currently be controlled by your forum's theme. Let me check on this.

Capybara

neoncube
Yes, I think shifting the arrow is the right decision. And you're right about the color: it depends on the color of the forum. But I don't have gray 🤔

neoncube

Capybara Hm, I bet the gray color is hardcoded. I'll put this on my mental TODO list 🙂

Spez

Does this extension need websocket to work?

neoncube

Spez No, but because it doesn't need websockets, the user will need to refresh the page in order to see new messages.

The original code had support for Flarum's Push feature and websockets, but I haven't had a chance to fix that code yet 🙂

Spez

neoncube Great. I don't need realtime. because I heard websocket is paid

Spez

I think the messaging frame should be full screen. We have the forum scroll bar, the chat frame scroll bar, and the message content scroll bar. Total is 3 pieces. Quite troublesome when texting on the mobile interface. I think we should make the chat frame full screen and fix it, just scrolling the message content is enough.

Spez

Hopefully there will be an additional feature to open a general group chat. Where all registered members are automatically included. Just like Shoutbox

Capybara

Tested the update. Now there are notifications, you can see when the user types a message, you can see when the user is online, I don't remember if it was in the first version. The read indication still hits the message if it is more than one line

neoncube

I've just released v1.2.1, which I think should fix most of the mobile issues 🙂 If you're still seeing issues, please let me know.

Haven't had a chance to work on the read indicator yet, sorry. I'd like to make an option to disable read indicators, and roll that work into a single release.

I think it'd be cool to support having multiple people in a single chat, but honestly, I think that's a long way off.

I'm working on adding support for sending email notifications when a private message is received 🙂

14569

neoncube The mobile interface is still terrible, and I think you should hide the list of users to a dropdown menu when you select the users you want to DM to reduce the footprint.

xiaoxiaobai5724

14569 That's right, the mobile version is even worse, the message page is almost invisible.

neoncube

14569 Sorry, I hadn't worked on this plugin in a week or so, so I'd kind of forgotten what changes I'd made in the last update. On my test site, prior to this update, private messages on mobile was totally broken: When a user tapped on the name of a conversation, nothing happened. Were private messages on mobile working on your site prior to this update?

With this update, chatting on mobile should at least be partially working, but as you've pointed out, it's still pretty bad.

Spez

neoncube
I think a chat bubble-like mobile interface similar to FaceBook Messenger on Android would be the perfect choice. Looking forward to new updates from you. I recommended your Extensions to FreeFlarum and now it is available on FreeFlarum for everyone to experience.

neoncube

Thanks, Spez, that's really cool! ^_^ I wasn't familiar with FreeFlarum until your post 🙂

Anonymous41

its very cool

Medelinor

Thanks for this useful extension

I have some comments I would like to share with you, please note that I am using RTL as my primary extension, and I am also using translation here.

Notes

Email Notification Messages

Where -for some reason- the text appears in a format that is not understandable to the reader:

Mobile compatibility

It's hard to chat on the forum using a mobile device, as the chat text is very narrow. It would be great if the chat menu was included in the hamburger button.

I don't know if I'm the only one affected by this or if there are other people facing the same issues that would be great to take into consideration.

Thank you very much

ernestdefoe

Medelinor everyone using this extension is having the same issues on mobile and it has been brought up a few posts back. Hopefully a fix will come for it soon.

neoncube

Medelinor Whoops, the emailing feature was supposed to be disabled XD Still, this should be working, and thanks for the bug report 🙂 What email client are you using? It looks like the extension is sending HTML emails but they're being shown as text.