The project is essentially an extremely simplified version of chat.. You sign up for the website, you log in, and then you have a list of all the people who have signed up for the website and who are currently online (Meaning that they've signed in and haven't logged off, not that they're necessarily active on the site). You click on any one of those people, and it opens a little chatbox (I was thinking inside the page, much more challenging than just a JavaScript pop-up), where you.. Chat.
Right now, I'm stuck on pretty much everything. I designed the sign up and log in pages without a problem, but I'm having difficulty writing the code that will display all the online users. I could easily write a code that would display all users, but how can I know which ones are online? Also, what value do I assign to the href attribute so that when I click on the link of someone's name, it opens up the chatbox? When that's done, I think I know how I can actually send the messages, but one step at a time.
Any help with any of my problems would be greatly appreciated
Edit: I just wanted to add, I'm also fairly experienced with JavaScript, if that's relevant information