Installation
You should follow installation instructions step by step. This is a professional version of product targeted at experienced web-masters, and as such, assumes that installation will be performed by competent individuals. If you don not follow the setup procedure there is a very good chance that the product would not work properly, at least initially or that you would spend more time debugging it than reading this short document.
Look and feel, Colors and Smileys
To change colors used by the chat User Interface (UI) please edit chat.css file. This file is fully commented so you would know what CSS class affects which parts of the UI. Some of the color changes would also require changing images - see comments in CSS file for details.
If you would like to make some more powerful modifications to the UI, than just changing colors, you can modify the HTML in chat pages themselves. The pages that you would, most likely, be modifying are login.aspx, chat.aspx and exit.aspx. Again, since the UI is represented by HTML tags anybody with enough knowledge of HTML can modify the look and feel of the pages.
Smileys can be managed in js_page_chat.js file. In it you will see function formatPopSmileys, which renders the smiley pop-up window. Adding a new smiley image is a 3 step process:
You need to create a new image and place it into images/chat/smiley directory.
You have to add a new entry in the smiley pop-up window in formatPopSmileys function in js_page_chat.aspx file.
You
need to add a new row in the smArr
array in function MsgTextFormat() in jschat.aspx file. Each row, consisting
of 3 elements in this 1-dimentional array represents one smiley. For example,
first few rows of the array look like this:
var smArr=new Array(1, "O:[\\+-]?\\)",
"O:+)",
2,
":[-o]?\\[",
":[",
The first element of the three is the file name of the image in
the smiley directory (i.e. "1.gif");
the second is the regular expression that matches the text to replace
it by a smiley; and the third is the Alt text for the resulting image
that will be rendered.
note: By default, jschat.aspx
page comes obfuscated to save space and protect users. As such, all the
variables and function names in it are renamed and squeezed into one line.
So, in order to complete the last step you would either need to purchase
the SDK, which contains un-obfuscated version of the JavaScript files
or find the smiley mapping array in the
chatjs.aspx file by values used.
Translation to other languages
ZBit Net Chat is designed so that it can be easily translated to other spoken languages. By default the package comes with English language (turned on by default), Spanish, French, Hebrew and Russian languages which can be switched to by modifying one entry on web.config file (see configuration section below). If you would like to translate the chat to another language, please create a new resource DLL, copy the string table from the main chat DLL file (chat_net3.dll) located in bin directory, translate it to your language and save it under a sub-directory under the bin directory that corresponds to that new language. After you change the globalization entry in web.config, your chat should work in the new language.
Configuration
As stated already in
the installation instructions, which, we
are sure, have been read by now, most of configurable parameters for the
chat are stored in the database. However, some of the things can not be
stored in the database (i.e. the database connection string itself). These
settings are part of web.config
file found in root of ZBit ASP.NET Chat Pro installation directory. One
of the most important setting of all, is the logging directory (configuration/appSettings/add key="zbc.Log.Directory").
It is so important because chat server is not a desktop application, and
as such, can not provide user feedback in UI. It is rather a service application
and can only interact with a user via log files when something is miss-configured
or just doesn't work. So, it is very important that this entry is pointing
to an existing physical directory on the server with a proper (read/write/browse)
access rights for the windows account that is running the .NET chat. The
windows account that is running ASP.NET application could be ASPNET account
or some other account with a similar purpose. Please check the IIS configuration
and read IIS help for more information. See installation
instructions for more information.
Another important parameter in web.config
file is the Database connection string (zbc.ConnectionString).
Please make sure it points to the proper Data Source entry
for chat database as described in the installation
instructions.
If you would like to
switch a language of the chat UI you would have to find the globalization
entry in the web.config file (configuration/system.web/globalization).
You have to change the uiCulture
attribute of this node to the language of your choice (i.e. "en" for English, "ru"
for Russian, "fr" for
French, "de" for German,
"it" for Italian, "ja" for Japanese, "es" for Spanish and
so on). You have to make sure that the language resource is available
already for that language as described in translation
to other languages section above.
Other settings in web.config are self-explanatory.
Once the chat is up and running please log-in to as the administrator to
tweak other settings as described in installation
instructions.
Un-installation
If automated setup was used to install the software, please uninstall it using "Add or Remove Programs" option in control panel. This option will remove all the files created by the setup.
If the product was setup manually (using .zip package) please go through the following steps to uninstall it.
Remove Virtual directory in IIS management console that was pointing to the ZBit ASP.NET Chat Pro chat.
Restart IIS service.
Delete the physical directory where ZBit ASP.NET Chat Pro is installed from your machine.
If you use SQL
Server drop zbit_net_chat database.
Known Issues
Because of the limitation
of IIS that runs on the windows workstations (Windows 2000 Pro or Windows
XP Pro), ZBit ASP.NET Chat Pro can only run on Microsoft Windows Servers.
The product has been successfully tested on Windows 2000 Server and Windows
2003 Server. IIS that runs on non-server version of windows limits number
of simultaneous connections and although one or two chatting users might
be able to log-in, subsequent connections will be refused and client browser
will show an error "HTTP 403.9 - Access Forbidden: Too many users
are connected". Windows servers do not have such limitation,
so , chat server can accept unlimited number of users.
Default installation of Windows 2003 Server configures IIS worker process to recycle every so often (by default every 26 hours). Because chat keeps all it's data-structures in memory, restarting working process is equivalent of restating the chat server application. To prevent this behavior please un-check corresponding option in the configuration of the application pool that runs the chat server. Otherwise the chat will be restarted on regular intervals and all the users will get kicked out at these times.