JotCast Live Chats

Description

JotCast Live Chats connects your WordPress site to JotCast live chat, enabling zero-click single sign-on for your users. When a logged-in WordPress user visits a page with a JotCast chat embed, they are automatically signed in using their WordPress display name. No extra accounts, no login buttons, no redirects.

Features:

• Zero-click SSO — WordPress users are automatically authenticated in JotCast chats with no additional steps.
• Chat visibility control — Restrict who can see chats on your site based on WordPress role: everyone, logged-in users only, subscribers and above, or administrators only.
• Membership gating — Use the jotcast_user_is_member filter hook to define your own membership criteria. Works with any membership plugin including Groups, MemberPress, Paid Memberships Pro, WooCommerce Memberships, and custom solutions.
• Secure token exchange — SSO keys are exchanged server-to-server using short-lived, single-use authorization codes. Your encryption key never touches the browser.
• AES-256-CBC encryption — User data is encrypted before being passed to JotCast, ensuring secure transmission.

How it works:

1. Install and activate the plugin.
2. Go to Settings → JotCast Live Chats and click “Connect to JotCast.”
3. Authorize the connection with your JotCast account.
4. That’s it. Your existing JotCast chat embeds will automatically log in your WordPress users.

Membership gating with custom filters:

If you want to restrict certain JotCast chats to paying members, you can define your own membership logic using the jotcast_user_is_member filter. Add this to your theme’s functions.php or a custom plugin:

add_filter('jotcast_user_is_member', function($is_member, $user) {
    // Your custom membership check here
    // Return true if the user is a paying member, false otherwise
    return $is_member;
}, 10, 2);

The result is included in the SSO token, and you can mark individual chats as “Members Only” in JotCast’s chat creation form.

Requirements:

• A JotCast account (sign up at jotcast.com)
• One or more JotCast chat embeds on your WordPress site
• PHP 7.4 or higher with the OpenSSL extension

External services

This plugin connects to the JotCast service (https://www.jotcast.com) to provide live chat functionality with automatic single sign-on for your WordPress users.

When the plugin is first connected:
A one-time server-to-server request is made to JotCast to exchange a short-lived authorization code for an SSO encryption key. Your site URL and site name are sent during this process.

On every page load that contains a JotCast chat embed:
The plugin encrypts the logged-in user’s display name, email address, profile picture URL, and membership status using AES-256-CBC, and appends the encrypted token to the JotCast embed script URL. This data is sent to JotCast so the user can be automatically signed into the chat. No data is sent for users who are not logged in.

• Service: JotCast
• Terms of Service: https://www.jotcast.com/terms.html
• Privacy Policy: https://www.jotcast.com/privacy.html