Repurposing WordPress for live chat

WordPress is a free and open-source content management system. It is a powerful tool for building websites. WordPress has lots of benefits over other content management systems due to its widespread usage and constant development.

While WordPress is a very easy system for those who know how to use it, it can be quite daunting for new users who aren’t familiar with navigating the back end. This became very evident while developing our Hijack platform. One of the features of Hijack is a live chat function: visitors ask questions and the team running the Hijack can reply with answers in real-time.

Live chat isn’t ‘default’ WordPress functionality, so we found ourselves using a slightly unconventional method to reply to messages in the back end. The staff and academics in charge of answering questions on live events sometimes found that the original Hijack interface took some getting used to. With the release of Hijack 2.0, that has all changed!

The SMILE team were eager to design and build a new interface that mimicked what most users now expect when they hear the words ‘live chat’ or ‘Q&A’. While we wanted to revamp the space, we made sure to not drift too far away from the style and general design of WordPress itself.

From a technical standpoint, the biggest improvement is that you no longer need to refresh the page to see new messages. This is a bonus for institutions — it can vastly improve response times because questions arrive in real-time.

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