Chatterbox

Chatterbox is a new plugin that uses a templating engine to provide the ultimate in flexibility. You can write simple formats, or leverage the power of the Rythm Engine or even Java itself to create the perfect chat experience.

Looking for some documentation? Maybe help us translate Chatterbox to your language?

In the Minecraft ecosystem, there are lots of different ways to do chat. There are countless numbers of plugins, formats, scripting languages, channel options, and so on. The main problem that we've seen is that each plugin is designed to fill a certain niche – there are channel-based plugins, but they may not support your favourite Factions-style plugin, or there might be a chat plugin that does support Factions but doesn't have any concept of admin chat.

We'll be honest – it's hard to cover every eventuality and every need in just one plugin. What we can do, however, is give users the tools they need to make the plugin work for them, rather than having to fight with the plugin's code or developers. We hope that we've done an adequate job at this.

Introducing: Chatterbox.

The Cadillac of chat plugins

Fast, reliable, and just how you like it, Chatterbox is a channels-based plugin with full support for JSON messages, that ensures that you can give your players the best chat experience possible. Chatterbox is targeted at the following types of admins:

• Admins who just want to throw a plugin onto their server and have it work
• Admins who need to control every aspect of their chat, down to the individual characters
• Non-programmers that want a simple solution to their chat formatting woes
• Programmers who want the most power any chat plugin is able to afford

Using the extremely powerful Rythm Engine, Chatterbox affords the best possible customization to date. The engine allows server admins to control every aspect of their chat by using templates, files or strings that allow ultimate control over chat formatting through the use of conditionals, loops, and other advanced constructs. Rythm also allows admins full access to the rest of Java, in the event that they need to work with the server directly.

Rhythm templates are compiled to Java bytecode the first time they're loaded. This keeps things lightning-fast, without sacrificing on customization. Here's just a few things you can do with our system:

• Set a different chat format for each channel or user through the use of conditionals
• Use certain methods and functions available to cause actions to happen based on the message contents
• Charge users for messages or change their health
• Write your own simple chat censor/filter, or even your own pseudo-commands (using a prefix other than "/")
• Integrate your chat format with other plugins, whether they support Chatterbox or not, using the Bukkit API
• Make use of hooks and events to integrate your own plugins fully with Chatterbox, and to add capabilities to your users' templates

The possibilities are, as they say, endless.

Installation and usage

Looking for some documentation? Maybe help us translate Chatterbox to your language?

Right now, the plugin is in the public testing phase. There are no stable releases. If you'd like to help us test, please head over to #chatterbox on irc.esper.net or check us out on GitHub. We've recently submitted a file to BukkitDev for approval as well, so please do try that out and give us some feedback.

We also have a website and forum under development – you can find that over at chatterbox.works for the main site, and chatter.chatterbox.works for the forum.