Chat room
Besides the typical delayed debate option, where one delegate posts something and another replies in a few hours or days, I also want to have a chat room system available. A small number of delegates (10 at most) would enter a private chat room at a set time and have a regular debate for maybe 30mn.
I decided to use a system called PHPOpenChat. This free chat system was developed by a group of programmers and you can basically add the code to your page to have a simple chatroom that you can customize. There were many systems available but PHPOpenChat was the most developed and it had the most documentation available.
Facebook Connect
Registration is a long and painful process, and it's also a little hard to set up. I have been on a few websites, however, that allow you to create an account on their site using your regular Facebook account. I looked this up and found out Facebook developed an API called Facebook Connect, that lets websites other than Facebook use your facebook account for various things - simply logging in, commenting, sharing pictures...
I want to give my visitors the option of connecting to my website using Facebook, as my target group is the kind that will most likely have a social network account. This way, if the registration process I code for my website myself doesn't work, visitors can still log in using Facebook Connect. It will also make registration much faster for people who just want to have a look.
reCAPTCHA
Captchas are the little registration confirmation codes that require you to read two words that are strangely twisted to make sure you're not a computer. I want to prevent my website from being attacked by any type of hackers, so I chose to use captchas. reCAPTCHAS are very easy to implement - you can simply add a few lines of code to your registration page. I also chose them because they have options such as an audible captcha for blind people and are therefore accessible to everyone.
phpBB
phpBB is a technology used to create discussion forums. I want a discussion forum for my users to discuss matters outside MUN. phpBB allows you to create very complex, customizable forums that are afterwards easily managed, and it's free, so it's by far my first choice. Many phpBB forums can be found throughout the internet as it is the leading technology for creating simple discussion forums.
Meebo bar
As an added functionality, I want my users to be able to chat with their other messaging accounts (Google Mail, Facebook, MSN, Yahoo...) while they are on WEBMUN. I think this will keep people connected longer. For this I found a very simple solution called the Meebo Bar - a simple bar at the bottom of the page from which you can connect to all your other clients. This is once again very simple to implement.
Links
http://www.phpopenchat.org/
http://www.facebook.com/connectnews?v=app_7146470109
http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorials/PHP/Chat-Systems/1
http://bar.meebo.com/
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