This is a Proof-Of-Concept implementation to extend zulip to enable chatting-with-customers features.

• One extra view was added to expose limited chat UI to customer views/support.py.
• List of Support accounts which would be mapped with customer are part of views/zulip-support.py
• For routing two urls are to be added to current zproject/urls.py which are in urls.py
• To prevent customers from accessing email ids of complete realm we tweaked get_status_dict in zerver/libs/actions.py

# Return no status info for regular users
if requesting_user_profile.realm.domain != settings.ADMIN_DOMAIN:
    return defaultdict(dict)

• Similar check was added to views/__init__.py home function to redirect customer to support interface.
• At the moment we auto-login customer after asking their email-id. For security purpose, we create a new private stream for the customer and unsubscribe it form previous existing streams. Ideally there should be a way(OAuth or server-to-server authentication) to make sure user is logged in on main site and then enable previous history of chats they had done.
• These htmls could be rendered inside an iframe on your home page to give you a private, self hosted chat-with-us plugin for your site.