tangram / django-talk

A simple, smooth private messaging app for Django

django-talk

A simple, smooth private messaging app for Django.

Features:

• A functional layout similar to a major social site's messages page
• Lightly styled so you can apply your own
• Allows Markdown when posting
• Middleware using cache to see conversation partners' online status
• E-mail notifications when conversation partners are away
• AJAX updates when posting messages and polling for new ones, among other things

Usage

Installation

pip install git+git://github.com/tangram/django-talk#egg=talk

Requirements should be automatically installed.

Setup

Add the app and dependencies to your INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'talk',
    'autocomplete_light',
)

Add the middleware to your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    ...
    'talk.middleware.UserLastseenMiddleware',
)

Include talk.urls in your urlconf, e.g.:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    ...
    url(r'^talk/', include('talk.urls')),
    ...
)

Optional settings to control in chat/idle/away indicators (in seconds):

USER_IN_CHAT_TIMEOUT = 20
USER_ONLINE_TIMEOUT = 300

Notes

This app uses very primitive AJAX polling every 10 seconds to check for new messages. This is far from optimal and does not scale well. Proper long polling and websocket functionality will be added by v1.0.