Getting Online Status

[billrini]

I've searched around and couldn't really find an answer.

Basically, what I want to do is get the online status for a particular user. I have a chat application I'm integrating and I would like to show a link on the person's profile ONLY if they are online.

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be very straightforward. In the profile template it spits out prepared.onlinestatus which includes the online status image and HTML.

That comes from postbit_online status and through some reverse engineering it appears that that gets populated via functions_bigthree.php. But the only call I ever see made to it (for my purposes) is in class_userprofile.php

PHP Code:

fetch_online_status($this->userinfo, true); 


The true part seems to toggle whether or not it spits back the data or registers the postbit_onlinestatus template.

So, let's say I wanted to write some additional code that made another call to the function with the false flag set so that I could access the actual online status rather than get HTML returned. How would I go about that? Is that a plugin?

Or is there a way to access the variable that posbit_onlinestatus is using ($onlinestatus==0)? How can I get at that variable?

This is driving me mad and it seems like something that should be easy to expose and useful for template authors and developers.