13 posts tagged with "WebSocket"

Building a WordPress site with AI chat bots is now a one-day project, not a six-month one. The hard parts — model selection, API key management, streaming responses, conversation context, system prompts — are commoditized across providers (OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini). What is still missing is the WordPress-native messenger layer that puts the bot in front of your members where conversations already happen, in the same UI as private DMs and group chats. Better Messages closes that gap: configure an OpenAI / Claude / Gemini bot once, and it shows up as a regular user inside the messenger, with streamed responses, custom personality, and the same UX members already use for human DMs.

OneSignal is the most-installed web-push notification plugin on WordPress — it adds the browser permission prompt, manages subscriptions, and delivers push notifications through OneSignal's hosted service. The standard OneSignal WordPress plugin sends push notifications for new posts but does not natively know about private messages. Better Messages adds the missing piece: it auto-associates WordPress user IDs with OneSignal subscriptions as External User IDs, then dispatches a OneSignal push for every new private message so recipients hear about it even when their browser is closed or the site tab is in the background.

The single biggest UX gap between a WordPress messaging plugin and a serious modern messenger is delivery latency — how long it takes a sent message to appear in the recipient's window. A page-reload messenger feels like email. An AJAX-polling messenger feels like a fast email. A WebSocket-powered messenger feels like WhatsApp. Better Messages supports both shapes — AJAX polling on the free version (no separate server, runs on any WordPress hosting) and WebSocket on the paid version (instant delivery, online presence, typing indicators) — so any site can pick the right delivery mode for its scale.