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Simple PHP Chat App: A Step-by-Step Guide

Looking for ideas for exercise and entertainment, I came across an interesting, seemingly simple php chat app. MySQL, JavaSrcipt, Ajax can not be omitted. 🙂 There is a three-hour video clip that leads through the creation of the application, of course the text variant is also available, and most importantly the complete code. I would like to thank Coding Nepal for the work, effort and idea!

About php chat app

The functionalities that the application offers are as follows

  • User registration;
  • Login;
  • Search for registered users;
  • Display of user status;
  • Display part of the last sent message (in users list);
  • And of course chat functionality.

From the picture it can be concluded that it is a very simple application with a few functionalities, but it does the job. I will not go into some deeper analysis of the code, it’s been done in the video clip. But I will mention the impressions and comments while working on the application.

Comprehensive Guide and Future Tips for Building a PHP Chat App

Right at the beginning, I will emphasize that the development of the application on the local server and on the production server is not the same. In the local server, the application works without problems, while in the production, after registration and login, I get error 500 – internal server error. So before I continue working, I will have to eliminate the cause of that error. I am aware that the configuration of the local server and in production is not the same and that there may be a cause to the problem. I’m just at the beginning, and it’s irritating 🙂 But I was warned a long time ago that the sleeves must be rolled up well in order to achieve something.

Well, when this minor difficulty is solved, I will keep the ideas written down here that I will implement. And those are:

  • group chat;
  • better text editor (enabling text formatting functionality, inserting emoticons);
  • file sharing;
  • user profile;
  • a better system for registering and resetting a forgotten password.

For starters I think that’s quite enough 🙂

Edit – 2021.03.11

Issue with internal server error 500 resolved after cloning github repository where app is stored. Origin of error was most likely .htaccess setup for folder where app is stored.

Links to source code and demo

Github

Chat application demo

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