Documentation

Getting started

Activating creates the database tables Talkzyo needs and schedules its cleanup task. Nothing is visible to members until you pick a placement.

Requirements

Licence

Paste your key into Talkzyo → General Settings and save. The key is on your account page.

When a licence expires

Nothing breaks and nothing is lost. Messages still send and arrive, and every conversation stays intact. What stops is instant delivery — the chat falls back to checking on a timer — along with the other paid features. Renewing switches them back on with no reconfiguration.

A dismissible notice appears in your admin area during the two weeks before expiry.

Placement

Three options, and you can use more than one.

The shortcode

To put the full inbox on any page or post of your own, use:

Please log in to view your messages.

This is how you add a messages area on a site without BuddyPress — create a page, drop the shortcode in, and link to it from your menu.

Only logged-in users load the chat. Logged-out visitors download none of it, and the shortcode renders nothing for them.

Settings reference

Everything lives under Talkzyo in the WordPress menu, split across the panels below. Each one saves independently.

General

Features

Moderation

Attachments

Notifications

Mail

What a licence includes

Talkzyo is a licensed plugin. A licence turns on everything below and registers your site for instant delivery; there is no free edition.

Paid switches stay visible in the settings panel without a licence rather than disappearing, so you can see what a licence would turn on.

Realtime & privacy

With a licence, Talkzyo connects to a hosted realtime service so messages appear the moment they are sent. Without one it checks on a timer instead — slower, but complete.

Your messages never reach us

This is unusual, and deliberate. The realtime service carries signals, never content. When someone sends a message, the only thing that leaves your server is effectively “conversation 5 has a new message, number 900”. The recipient's browser then fetches the message itself from your own WordPress site.

Message text, attachments, voice notes and member details never pass through our infrastructure. We could not read your members' conversations if we wanted to.

It also means an outage of the realtime service degrades to timer mode rather than losing anything.

What the service does see

A per-site identifier, numeric user IDs, conversation IDs and message IDs — enough to route a signal to the right browsers, and nothing that says what was said.

Attachments

Members can attach images and files to a message, and send GIFs from the built-in picker.

The maximum file size is set per field in the plugin's settings, in megabytes, and is checked on the server as well as in the browser — so raising it in one place is enough. Your host's own upload_max_filesize and post_max_size still apply on top, and whichever is smaller wins. If uploads fail at a size below your setting, that is usually the reason.

Files are stored in your own uploads folder, organised per member, and are removed when the message that carried them is deleted for everyone.

Voice messages

Hold the microphone button to record, then send. Recordings are stored in your own uploads folder like any other attachment.

• HTTPS is required — browsers will not grant microphone access otherwise.
• Press Enter while recording to send it. Shift+Enter still inserts a new line.
• Pause and resume mid-recording, or cancel to discard.

AddType audio/webm .webm
AddType audio/ogg  .ogg
AddType audio/mpeg .mp3
AddType audio/mp4  .m4a

Mentions

Type @ in the composer to search members of the conversation and insert a mention. The person mentioned is notified even if the conversation is otherwise quiet.

Mentions are recalculated when a message is edited: adding someone notifies them, and removing them withdraws the notification rather than leaving it pointing at text that no longer names them.

Groups

Start a group by adding more than one person to a new conversation. Groups support a name, a photo and roles.

If a licence lapses, new groups are limited to 3 members until it is renewed. Existing larger groups are not broken — they keep working exactly as they were, you simply cannot add more people to them meanwhile.

With BuddyPress active, Talkzyo can mirror BuddyPress groups so a group's members get a shared conversation automatically.

Moderation

Any member can report a message or a person, on every site, licensed or not. With a licence you also get the tools to act, under Talkzyo → Moderation:

• A queue of reported messages and members
• Automatic hiding once enough distinct people report the same message — reversible, unlike deletion
• Strikes and bans, per conversation or site-wide
• A record of what was actioned and by whom

Push notifications

Members can opt in to browser notifications and be told about new messages when the tab is closed. Requires HTTPS and a licence.

Muted conversations never generate a push. Muting silences the interruption, not the conversation, and applies to reactions and group events as well as plain messages.

Email notifications

Talkzyo can email a member when they receive a message while they are away. Templates and triggers are configured in the plugin's settings.

Email uses whatever WordPress is already configured to use on your site. If your other WordPress email is not arriving, Talkzyo's will not either — that is a site-wide mail configuration issue, and an SMTP plugin is the usual fix.

A muted conversation never sends email, in the same way it never sends a push.

Privacy & data

Conversations, messages, attachments, read state, reactions and reports all live in your own database and uploads folder. Nothing is stored anywhere else.

Members can choose who may start a conversation with them, block individuals, and delete their own messages — either for themselves or for everyone. When a WordPress user is deleted, their messages and participation go with them.

Data export and erasure requests

Talkzyo registers with WordPress's own privacy tools, so it is included automatically in Tools → Export Personal Data and Tools → Erase Personal Data. A member's messages, conversations and attachments are part of the export, and are removed by an erasure request — you do not need to do anything special to handle a GDPR request for chat data.

Uninstalling

Troubleshooting

Translating

Talkzyo ships with a talkzyo.pot template in its languages folder and a complete Arabic translation. Any tool that reads a POT file — Loco Translate, Poedit — will work.

Right-to-left languages are supported: the chat ships RTL stylesheets and flips its layout automatically when WordPress is running in an RTL locale, so Arabic and Hebrew read correctly without any configuration.

Translations you add to wp-content/languages/plugins/ survive plugin updates. Ones placed inside the plugin folder do not.

For developers

Talkzyo is built around filters. Some of the more useful ones:

Actions fire around the message lifecycle — talkzyo_message_after_save, talkzyo_message_edited, talkzyo_conversation_mute_changed and others — so you can hook your own behaviour on without patching the plugin.