In today’s ecommerce, the name of the game is customer support. Various ways of customer support have evolved lately, ranging from the famous email to instant messaging. One that is really standing out from the rest is live chat integrated in websites that allows real time communication with website visitors. There are various scripts on the market, both free and paid versions. In this article, we review PHP Live! , one of most popular live support solution.

Installation

PHP Live! requires you to have PHP and mySQL installed on your server. Once all the files are uploaded, and the ‘ web/’ directory is made writable (CHMOD 777), all you then have to do is point your browser to your PHP Live! folder, and the installation process will begin.

Installing PHP Live! is really easy and you can do that even if your dog ran away with the readme.txt file! The installation wizard will guide you through the steps required to set up PHP Live! on your server. After entering your site’s name, you’ll be prompted to enter your document root and base URL (don’t panic, those values will be automatically filled in).   You’ll be then requested to enter more information about your company (username, password, email address) and your database information (server, database name, username, password), and you’ll be done with the installation.

One important note here is that you’ll need to password protect the administration folder ‘ super/ ’, and detailed instructions are available on the PHP Live! Support site on how to do this. I guess that the folks at PHP Live! should have included an authentication system themselves to aid the newbie.