ChatPuff for WooCommerce

Live chat for your WooCommerce shop: your customers chat from the storefront, and you answer from the WordPress admin or the ChatPuff dashboard.

This plugin connects a shop to ChatPuff. It is deliberately thin: the chat widget and the inbox are served by ChatPuff, so fixes reach every shop without a plugin update. The WordPress.org description is in readme.txt.

Requirements

• WordPress 5.3 or newer, WooCommerce 3.8 or newer, PHP 7.4 to 8.5
• HTTPS on the site, and outgoing HTTPS connections from the server to api.chatpuff.com

Connecting a shop

1. Activate the plugin and open ChatPuff > Settings (administrators).
2. Click Connect to ChatPuff. A ChatPuff page opens: sign in, or create a free account, and confirm the shop.
3. ChatPuff checks that the request really comes from the shop's domain by calling the plugin's REST route, /wp-json/chatpuff/v1/callback. The settings page then shows the shop as connected.

On a multisite, each site is connected separately (the shop context is the blog ID). The chat stays hidden until an owner or admin publishes it from the ChatPuff dashboard.

The chat links to the site's privacy policy page (Settings > Privacy) where it asks guests for their name and email.

The chat on the storefront

The plugin enqueues ChatPuff's loader.js in the footer of every storefront page, so it works with every theme and page builder that prints the footer scripts. The tag is async, carries data-cfasync="false" for Cloudflare's Rocket Loader, and only appears on the domain the site was connected with: a staging copy never shows the live shop's chat.

For a logged-in user, the tag carries a customer token (a JWT signed with the site's connection key, valid for 10 minutes) with the user ID, name and email, so the chat skips its form. Page caches do not keep pages of logged-in users.

The inbox in the WordPress admin

ChatPuff > Inbox shows the same inbox as the ChatPuff dashboard. Users who can manage WooCommerce (shop managers, administrators), or who have the chatpuff_inbox capability, can open it. Each person links their WordPress account to their ChatPuff account once, in a ChatPuff window; after that, the plugin asks ChatPuff for 15-minute staff tokens that reach only the shops of this WordPress.

Reports

Once an hour (WP-Cron), and when the settings page opens after an update, the plugin reports its version and the WooCommerce and PHP versions to ChatPuff. The report doubles as the connection's heartbeat.

Development

The plugin has no runtime dependencies. The development tools come from Composer:

composer install
vendor/bin/phpcs                  # WordPress coding standards, PHP 7.4 compatibility
vendor/bin/phpstan analyse        # level 8, with WordPress and WooCommerce stubs
php tools/compile-translations.php  # after changing a languages/*.po file

Point the plugin at a local ChatPuff with define( 'CHATPUFF_API_URL', 'http://127.0.0.1:8099' ); in wp-config.php.

Translations: languages/chatpuff.pot lists the strings; chatpuff-{locale}.po holds each language (el, es_ES, it_IT, fr_FR, de_DE and de_DE_formal, both German files in the formal "Sie" of ChatPuff's own German). WordPress.org language packs, once available, take precedence.

Releases

1. Set the new version in the plugin header, CHATPUFF_VERSION (both in chatpuff.php) and the Stable tag of readme.txt, and add its changelog entry to readme.txt.
2. Push a tag vX.Y.Z. The Release workflow checks that the three versions match, builds chatpuff-X.Y.Z.zip from the tracked files without the development files (.gitattributes), and publishes it as a GitHub release.

License

GPL-2.0-or-later. See LICENSE.