proximity sensor to trigger door<touch trigger> and poofer<chat trigger>..

i have a doormat script that seds a message to chat on collision, or proximity..
I have a door open script that works on touch..
i have a poofer with a chat trigger..
i want the proximity to the doormat to trigger door opening and the poofer..
is this an application for channels?
and <oh, lord, this sounds so helpless> how do they work?

Well, if you have source code for all these things, it would be an easy few minutes to just combine everything into one proximity-triggered script. If not, it may be easier to start from scratch.

The "touch-to-open door" is waiting for a touch_start() event, and there's no way to generate such an event from chat... so unless it's also waiting for a listen() event, it's not going to open the door from chat on any channel.

Although the poofer responds to chat--that is, it's waiting on a listen() event--it may be scripted to only listen to the owner (or less likely, check that the chat came from an agent not another scripted object), so it may or may not work, but that's easy to test with a simple script that simply llSay()s the activating command on whatever channel the poofer is configured to listen.

To the general question of how channels work, http://lslwiki.net/lslwiki/wakka.php?wakka=chat might be a reasonable place to start.