gausarts.com more art than science

Other posts in this site have already introduced how to add some fun into your own site, like collapsible login block or facebook-like chat panel. Most are dealing with drupal. Today I am going to show you what a cake it is to create the similar facebook-like chat panel right into your own WordPress.

You have tried to create facebook-like chat panel with meebo before. Now we are going to try it with drupal modules. You decide which module you prefer. See the post again for all available chat modules in drupal.

The title is not finished :) It should read Twitter is over capacity.

Even a giant microblog system is experiencing over capacity. This happened when I connect via web. I tried to post via thwirl, everything seems to be working.

Long live desktop applications :)

We have learned before how to create a slide up toggle with jquery to mimic facebook chat panel where it slides vertically bottom up. Another common variant is blind toggle, or slide down.

Now we are going to try different approach to how slide method works in jquery. To have a better idea on how it works, you may check it here.

We are trying to slide a whole login block horizontally.

Are you tired of the old YM buttons for your blog or CS?

You can have your own facebook-like chat panel right on your site with the cool slide toggle effect.

There can be another way to make compact form with jquery, the built-in jquery functions. If you have a simple need, such compacting a login block, and don't want to install another plugin or module, what I have done below may hopefully suffice. You can see the demo in the sidebar. Nothing fancy, only simpler:-) The best, useful or reasonable placement may be in a narrow horizontal space somewhere in your crowded design, but a vertical one should do for the demo now. We are going to elaborate how to make a horizontal login bar later more with CSS.

Do you ever need to make your form look compact or perhaps beautify it?

Drupal forms are ugly, as far as I can see. But drupal gives you some flexibility to change them. You can go through some theming part, install a module if you are with drupal 5, or go with javascript in your drupal 6.

If you are with me in drupal 6 and need it for a client, perhaps, then here is what I have done with javascript part. The steps are: