Free Live Chat for Multi-User Wordpress MU + WPMu IFrame Issue

Several Chatroll members have been asking lately about how to add chat to their Wordpress MU (multi-user) installation. Some of these members’ sites are very large: they host multiple Wordpress MU blogs and serve hundreds or even thousands of users.

Adding real-time chat functionality to any large community site is useful for many reasons. While traditional blog posts are a great way for community members to publish their content, live chat gives members a chance to exchange ideas and help each other in a whole new way. The additional functionality you can offer is limited only by your imagination: live blogs, interviews, commentary for live events, virtual community meetings, and more.

Wordpress MU and Chatroll can work together in harmony to create a great experience for your members. As usual, it’s simple to get a Chatroll community up and running. But, there are a few tricks you’ll need in order to integrate Chatroll perfectly into your multi-user Wordpress site.

The challenge (easily overcome!) is getting Wordpress MU to embed what’s called an “IFrame”. Chatroll uses IFrames as a way to seamlessly insert live chat into pages of your Wordpress site. While single-author versions of Wordpress have no issues with IFrame embedding, Wordpress MU seems to disable this functionality by default, likely for security reasons.

While chatting with another Wordpress MU user in Chatroll’s support community, we discovered a way to let Wordpress MU embed Chatroll’s chat box IFrame.

1. Install the Google Maps Quicktag plugin. Make sure to install the Wordpress MU version!
2. Copy the chat box embed code from your Chatroll community. This is the code that contains the chat box IFrame.
3. Paste the IFrame code in your Wordpress MU post using the Google Maps Quicktag plugin.

That’s it! Now you can add Chatroll live chat to any page on your Wordpress multi-user site.

If you have access to your site’s Wordpress theme, you can also paste the Chatroll embed code directly into the theme files. This gives you more precise control over the position of the chat box, and is useful if you want the chat to span multiple pages. One of Chatroll’s unique features is the ability for users to navigate around your site while staying in the chat. This can be extremely powerful if used correctly.

As always, please leave comments or questions below. Let us know how well Chatroll and WPMu work for you!